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THE CARE AND 
CULTURE OF MEN 



"THE BEST POLITICAL ECONOMY IS 
THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN" 
— Emerson. 



BY 



David Starr Jordan 

President OF 
Leland Stanford Junior University 



FRONTISPIECE BY 

F. SouLE Campbell 




San Francisco 
Whitaker & Ray-Wiggin Co 
I 9 I o 



U5^ 



■^^< 



Copyright, 1896 
by David Starr Jordan 

Copyright, IQIO 
by David Starr Jordan 



©CI,A2658S8 









TO 
JANE LATHROP STANFORD 



PREFACE. 

This volume is made up of addresses relating to 
higher education, delivered at different times before 
assemblies of teachers and students. The writer is 
under obligation to the publishers of the Popular Sci- 
ence Monthly, the Forum, and the Occidental Medical 
Times for the permission to reprint articles which have 
appeared in these periodicals. Most of the articles 
have been freely retouched since their original pub- 
lication. 
Palo Alto, Cal. 



FOREWORD TO THE PRESENT EDITION 

The plates of the first edition of "The Care and 
Culture of Men" were destroyed by the fire that 
followed the earthquake of 1906. In re-publishing 
the book the Editor has taken the Hberty of adding 
some new material that seemed properly to belong in 
it, while certain essays that appeared in the former 
volume have been omitted. — Editor. 



CONTENTS. 

The Value of Higher Education -------1 

The Nation's Need of Men - 27 

The School and the State --------39 

The Woman and the University - - ----- 71 

The Scholar in the Community -------91 

The Care and Culture of Men ------- HI 

The Practical Education --------- 121 

The Procession of Life --------- 131 

The Growth of Man - - - - - 137 

The Saving of Time --------- 159 

Knowing Real Men ----------185 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

WHAT I have to say here is addressed to 
young men and young women. It is a 
plea, as strong as I know how to make it, 
for higher education, for more thorough 
preparation for the duties of life. I know those well 
to whom I wish to speak. And to such as these, with 
the life and duties in the busy world before you, 
the best advice I or any one can give is this : "Go to 
college." 

And you may say : "These four years are among the 
best of my life. The good the college does must be 
great, if I should spend this time and money in secur- 
ing it. What will the college do for me ?" 

It may do many things for you — if you are made of 
the right stuff ; for you cannot fasten a two-thousand- 
dollar education to a fifty-cent boy. The fool, the 
dude, and the shirk come out of college pretty much 
as they went in. They dive deep in the Pierian 
springs, as the duck dives in the pond — and they come 
up as dry as the duck does. The college will not do 
everything for you. It is simply one of the helps by 
which you can win your way to a noble manhood or 
womanhood. Whatever you are, you must make of 

*Address before the California State Teachers' Association at Fresno, 
1892. 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

yourself; but a well-spent college life is one of the 
greatest helps to all good things. 

So, if you learn to use it rightly, this the college can 
do for you : It will bring you in contact with the great 
minds of the past, the long roll of those who, through 
the ages, have borne a mission to young men and 
young women, from Plato to Emerson, from Homer 
and Euripides to Schiller and Browning. Your thought 
will be limited not by the narrow gossip of to-day, but 
the great men of all ages and all climes will become 
your brothers. You will learn to feel what the Greek 
called the "consolations of philosophy." To turn from 
the petty troubles of the day to the thoughts of the 
masters, is to go from the noise of the street through 
the door of a cathedral. If you learn to unlock these 
portals, no power on earth can take from you the key. 
The whole of your life must be spent in your own 
company, and only the educated man is good company 
for himself. The uneducated man looks out on life 
through narrow windows, and thinks the world is 
small. 

The college can bring you face to face with the 
great problems of nature. You will learn from your 
study of nature's laws more than the books can tell 
you of the grandeur, the power, the omnipotence of 
God. You will learn to face great problems seriously. 
You will learn to work patiently at their solution, 
though you know that many generations must each add 
its mite to your work before any answer can be 
reached. 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

Your college course will bring you in contact with 
men whose influence will strengthen and inspire. The 
ideal college professor should be the best man in the 
community. He should have about him nothing mean, 
or paltry, or cheap. He should be to the student as 
David Copperfield's Agnes, "always pointing the way 
upward." 

That we are all this, I shall not pretend. Most col- 
lege professors whom I know are extremely human. 
We have been soured, and starved, and dwarfed in 
many ways, and many of us are not the men we might 
have been if we had had your chances for early edu- 
cation. But unpractical, pedantic, fossilized though 
the college professor may be, his heart is in the right 
place ; he is not mercenary, and his ideals are those of 
culture and progress. We are keeping the torch burn- 
ing which you, young men of the twentieth century, 
may carry to the top of the mountain. 

But here and there among us is the ideal teacher, 
the teacher of the future, the teacher to have known 
whom is of itself a liberal education. I have met 
some such in my day^ — Louis Agassiz, Charles Fred- 
erick Hartt, Asa Gray, George William Curtis, James 
Russell Lowell, Andrew Dickson White, among others, 
and there are many more such in our land. It is 
worth ten years of your life to know well one such 
man as these. Garfield once said that a log with Mark 
Hopkins at one end of it and himself at the other, 
would be a university. In whatever college you go, 
poor and feeble though the institution may be, you will 

3 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

find some man who, in some degree, will be to you 
what Mark Hopkins was to Garfield. To know him 
will repay you for all your sacrifices. It was said of 
Dr. Nott, of Union College, that he "took the sweep- 
ings of other colleges, and sent them back into society 
pure gold." Such was his influence on young men. 

Moreover, the training which comes from association 
with one's fellow students cannot be overestimated. 
Here and there, it is true, some young invertebrate, 
overburdened with money or spoiled by home-coddling, 
falls into bad company, and leaves college in worse 
condition than when he entered it. These are the 
windfalls of education. However much we may regret 
them, we cannot prevent their existence. But they are 
few among the great majority. Most of our apples 
are not worm-eaten at the core. The average student 
enters college for a purpose; and you will lose noth- 
ing, but may gain much, from association with him. 
Among our college students are the best young men 
of the times. They mold each other's character, and 
shape each other's work. Many a college man will 
tell you that, above all else which the college gave, he 
values the friendships which he formed in school. In 
the German universities, the "fellow feeling among 
free spirits" is held to be one of the most important 
elements in their grand system of higher education. 

Many a great genius has risen and developed in soli- 
tude, as the traiHng arbutus grows in the woods and 
scorns cultivation. Poets sing because their souls are 
full of music, not because they have learned the gamut 

4 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

of passions in schools. But all great work, in science, 
in philosophy, in the humanities, has come from enter- 
ing into the work of others. 

There was once a Chinese emperor who decreed that 
he was to be the first; that all history was to begin 
with him, and that nothing should be before him. But 
we cannot enforce such decree. We are not emperors 
of China. The world's work, the world's experience 
does not begin with us. We must know what has been 
done before. We must know the paths our predeces- 
sors have trodden, if we would tread them farther. 
We must stand upon their shoulders — dwarfs upon the 
shoulders of the giants — if we would look farther into 
the future than they. Science, philosophy, statesman- 
ship cannot for a moment let go of the past. 

The college intensifies the individuality of a man. 
It takes his best abilities and raises him to the second, 
or third, or tenth power, as we say in algebra. It is 
true enough that colleges have tried, and some of them 
still try, to enforce uniformity in study — to cast all 
students in the same mold. Colleges have been con- 
servative, old-fogyish, if you please. Musty old men 
in the dust of libraries have tried to make young men 
dry and dreary like themselves. Colleges have placed 
readiness above thoroughness, memory above mastery, 
glibness above sincerity, uniformity above originality, 
and the dialectics of the dead past above the work of 
the living present. The scepter of the Roman emperor 
has crumbled into dust, but the "rod of the Roman 
schoolmaster is over us still." 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

But say what you will of old methods, they often 
attained great ends. Colleges have aimed at uniform- 
ity. They did not secure it. The individuality of the 
student bursts through the cast-iron curriculum. 
"The man's the man for a' that," and the man is so 
much more the man nature meant him to be, because 
his mind is trained. 

The educated man has the courage of his convic- 
tions, because only he has any real convictions. He 
knows how convictions should be formed. What he 
believes he takes on his own evidence — not because it 
is the creed of his church or the platform of his party. 
So he counts as a unit in his community — not as part 
of a dozen or a hundred whose opinions are formed 
by their town's place on the map, or who train under 
the party flag because their grandfathers did the same. 
"To see things as they really are," is one of the crown- 
ing privileges of the educated man, and to help others 
to see them so, is one of the greatest services he can 
render to the community. 

But you may say: "All this may be fine and true, 
but it does not apply to my case. I am no genius; I 
shall never be a scholar. I want simply to get along. 
Give me education enough to teach a district school, 
or to run an engine, or to keep account books, and I 
am satisfied. Any kind of a school will be good 
enough for that." 

"The youth gets together his materials," says Tho- 
reau, "to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a 
palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the mid- 

6 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 



die-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with 
them." 

Now, why not plan for a woodshed at first, and save 
this waste of time and materials ? 

But this is the very good of it. The gathering of 
these materials will strengthen the youth. It may be 
the means of saving him from idleness, from vice. 
So long as you are at work on your bridge to the moon, 
you will shun the saloon, and we shall not see you on 
the drygoods box in front of the corner grocery. I 
know many a man who in early life planned only to 
build a woodshed, but who found later that he had the 
strength to build a temple, if he only had the materials. 
Many a man the world calls successful would give all 
life has brought him could he make up for the disad- 
vantages of his lack of early training. It does not 
hurt a young man to be ambitious in some honorable 
direction. In the pure-minded youth, ambition is the 
sum of all the virtues. Lack of ambition means fail- 
ure from the start.. The young man who is aiming at 
nothing, and cares not to rise, is already dead. There 
is no hope for him. Only the sexton and the under- 
taker can serve his purposes:"^ 

The old traveler, Rafinesque, tells us that, when he 
was a boy, he read the voyages of Captain Cook, and 
Pallas, and Le Vaillant, and his soul was fired with 
the desire to be a great traveler like them. "And so 
I became such," he adds shortly. 

If you say to yourself, "I will be a naturalist, a 
traveler, an historian, a statesman, a scholar;" if you 

7 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

never unsay it; if you bend all your powers in that 
direction, and take advantage of all those aids that 
help toward your ends, and reject all that dO' not, you 
will some time reach your goal. The world turns 
aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is 
going. 

"Why should we call ourselves men," said Mira- 
beau, ''unless it be to succeed in everything, every- 
where ? Say of nothing, 'This is beneath me,' nor feel 
that anything is beyond your powers. Nothing is 
impossible to the man who can will." 

"But a college education costs money," you may say. 
"I have no money ; therefore, I cannot go to college." 

But this is nonsense. If you have health and 
strength, and no one dependent on you, you cannot be 
poor. There is, in this country, no greater good luck 
that a young man can have than to be thrown on his 
own resources. The cards are stacked against the 
rich man's son. Of the many college men who have 
risen to prominence in my day, very few did not lack 
for money in college. I remember a little boarding 
club of the students at Cornell, truthfully called the 
"Struggle for Existence," and named for short, "The 
Strug," which has graduated more bright minds than 
any other single organization in my alma mater. 

The young men who have fought their way, have 
earned their own money, and know what a dollar costs, 
have the advantage of the rich. They enter the world 
outside with no luxurious habits, with no taste for 
idleness. It is not worth while to be born with a 

8 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 



silver spoon in your mouth, when a Httle effort will 
secure you a gold one. The time, the money that the 
unambitious young man wastes in trifling pursuits or 
in absolute idleness will suffice to give the ambitious 
man his education. The rich man's son may enter 
college with better preparation than you. He may 
wear better clothes. He may graduate younger. But 
the poor man's son can make up for lost time by 
greater energy and by the greater clearness of his grit. 
He steps from the commencement stage into no 
unknown world. He has already measured swords 
with the great antagonist, and the first victory is his. 
It is the first struggle that counts. 

But it is not poverty that helps a man. There is no 
virtue in poor food or shabby clothing. It is the 
effort by which he throws off the yoke of poverty that 
enlarges the powers. It is not hard work, but work 
to a purpose, that frees the soul. If the poor man 
lie down in the furrow and say : 'T won't try. I shall 
never amount to anything. I am too poor; and if I 
wait to earn money, I shall be too old to go to school." 
If you do this, I say, you won't amount to anything, 
and later in life you will be glad to spade the rich 
man's garden and to shovel his coal at a dollar a day. 

I have heard of a poor man in Wisconsin who earns 
a half-dollar every day by driving a cow to pasture. 
He watches her all day as she eats, and then drives her 
home at night. This is all he does. Put here your 
half-dollar and there your man. The one balances the 
other, and the one enriches the world as much as the 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

other. If it were not for the cow, the world would 
not need that man at all ! 

A young man can have no nobler ancestry than one 
made up of men and women who have worked for a 
living and who have given honest work. The instinct 
of industry runs in the blood. Naturalists tell us that 
the habits of one generation may be inherited by the 
next, reappearing as instincts. Whether this be liter- 
ally true or not, this we know: It is easy to inherit 
laziness. No money or luck will place the lazy man 
on the level of his industrious neighbor. The industry 
engendered by the pioneer life of the last generation is 
still in your veins. Sons and daughters of the West- 
ern pioneers, yours is the best blood in the realm. You 
must make the most of yourselves. If you cannot get 
an education in four years, take ten years. It is worth 
your while. Your place in the world will wait for you 
till you are ready to fill it. Do not say that I am 
expecting too much of the effects of a firm resolution ; 
that I give you advice which will lead you to failure. 
For the man who will fail will never make a resolution. 
Those among you whom fate has cut out for nobodies 
are the ones who will never try ! 

I said just now that you cannot put a two-thousand- 
dollar education on a fifty-cent boy. This has been 
tried again and again. It is tried in every college. 
It fails almost every time. What of that? It does 
not hurt to try. A few hundred dollars is not much 
to spend on an experiment like that — the attempt to 

10 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

make a man out of a boy whose life might otherwise 
be a waste of so much good oxygen. 

But what shall we say of a man who puts a fifty-cent 
education on a ten-thousand-dollar, a million-dollar 
boy, and narrows and cramps him throughout his after 
life? And just this is what ten thousand parents 
today in California are doing for their sons and 
daughters. Twenty years hence, ten thousand men 
and women of California will blame them for their 
shortness of sight and narrowness of judgment, in 
weighing a few paltry dollars, soon earned, soon lost, 
against the power which comes from mental training. 

"For a man to have died who might have been wise 
and was not — this," says Carlyle, "1 call a tragedy." 

Another thing which should never be forgotten is 
this : A college education is .not a scheme to enable a 
man to live without work. Its purpose is to help him 
to work to advantage — to make every stroke count. I 
have heard a father say sometimes: "I have worked 
hard all my life. I will give my boy an education, so 
that he will not have to drudge as I have had to do." 
And the boy going out in the world does not work as 
his father did. The result every time is disappoint- 
ment; for the manhood which the son attains depends 
directly on his own hard work. But if the father says : 
"My son shall be a worker, too; but I will give him 
an education, so that his work may count for more to 
himself and to the world than my work has done for 
me." Then, if the son be as persistent as his father, 
the results of his work may be far beyond the expec- 

11 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

tations of either. The boys who are sent to college 
often do not amount to much. From the boys who go 
to college come the leaders of the future. 

Frederic Denison Maurice tells us that "All experi- 
ence is against the notion that the means to produce 
a supply of good, ordinary men is to attempt nothing 
higher. I know that nine-tenths of those the univer- 
sity sends out must be hewers of wood and drawers 
of water; but if I train the ten-tenths to be such, then 
the wood will be badly cut, and the water will be spilt. 
Aim at something noble. Make your system of edu- 
cation such that a great man may be formed by it, and 
there will be a manhood in your little men of which you 
did not dream!" 

"You will hear every day around you," says Emer- 
son, "the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear 
that your first duty is to get land and money, place 
and name. 'What is this truth you seek? What is 
this beauty?' men will ask in derision. If, neverthe- 
less, God has called any of you to explore truth and 
beauty, be bold, be firm, be true ! When you shall say, 
'As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, 
my early visions. I must eat the good of the land and 
let learning and romantic expectations go until a more 
convenient season.' Then dies the man in you. Then 
once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and sci- 
ence, as they have died already in a hundred thousand 
men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your 
destiny." 

But you may ask me this question : "Will a college 

12 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

education pay, considered solely as a financial invest- 
ment?" 

Again I must answer, "Yes." But the scholar is 
seldom disposed to look upon his power as a financial 
investment. He can do better than to get rich. The 
scholar will say, as Agassiz said to the Boston pub- 
lisher, "I have no time, sir, to make money." 

But in the rank and file it is true that the educated 
men get the best salaries. In every field, from football 
to statesmanship, it is always science that wins the 
game. Brain work is higher than hand work, and it is 
worth more on any market. The man with the mind 
is the boss, and the boss receives a larger salary than 
the hands whose work he directs. 

George William Curtis has said: "I have heard it 
said that liberal education does not promote success in 
life. A chimney-sweep might say so. Without edu- 
cation he could gain the chimney top — poor little 
blackamoor ! — brandish his brush and sing his song of 
escape from soot to sunshine. But the ideal of suc- 
cess measures the worth of the remark that it may be 
attained without liberal education. If the accumula- 
tion of money be the standard, we must admit that a 
man might make a fortune in a hundred ways without 
education. But he could make a fortune, also, without 
purity of life, or noble character, or lofty faith. A 
man can pay much too high a price for money, and not 
every man who buys it knows its relative value with 
other possessions. Undoubtedly, Ezra Cornell and 
Matthew Vassar did not go to college, and they suc- 

13 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

ceeded in life. But their success — what was it ? 
Where do you see it now ? Surely not in their riches, 
but in the respect that tenderly cherishes their mem- 
ory, because, knowing its inestimable value, they gave 
to others the opportunity of education which had been 
denied to them." 

Some time ago. Chancellor Lippincott, of the State 
University of Kansas, wrote to each of the graduates 
of that institution, asking them to state briefly the 
advantages which their experience showed that they 
have derived from their college life and work. 

Among these answers, I may quote a few : 

One says : "My love for the State grew with every 
lesson I received through her care. I saved five years 
of my life by her training, and I am more loyal and a 
better citizen." 

Another says this : "I have a better standing in the 
community than I could have gained in any other 
way." 

Another says : "I would not exchange the advantages 
gained for a hundred times their cost, either to Kansas 
or to myself." 

Another declares: "It is financially the best invest- 
ment I ever made." 

To another it had given "strong friendship with the 
most intelligent young men of the State, those who 
are certain to largely influence its destiny." 

One said : "It has given me a place and an influence 
among a class of men whom I could not otherwise 
reach at all." 

14 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 



Another said : "I am better company for myself, and 
a better citizen, with far more practical interest in 
the State." 

Thus it is in Kansas, and thus it is everywhere. To 
the young man or young woman of character, the col- 
lege education does pay, from whatever standpoint 
you may choose to regard it. 

When I was a boy on a farm in Western New York, 
some one urged my parents to send me to college. 
"But what willhe find to do when he gets through col- 
lege?" they asked. "Never mind that," a friend said; 
"he will always find plenty to do. There is always 
room at the top." There is always room at the top! 
All our professions are crowded in America, but the 
crowd is around the bottom of the ladder ! 

We are proud, and justly proud, of our common- 
school system. The free school stands on every North- 
ern cross-road, and it is rapidly finding its way into the 
great New South. Every effort is made for the educa- 
tion of the masses. There is no upper caste to reap the 
benefits of an education, for which the poor man has to 
pay. There is no class educated and ruling by right of 
birth — no hereditary House of Lords. Our scholars 
and our leaders are of the people, from the people. The 
American plan is making us an intelligent people, as 
compared with the masses of any other nation. The 
number of those indifferent or ignorant is less in our 
Northern States than in England, or Germany, or 
France. But our leadership is worse than theirs. We 
have, for our numbers, fewer educated men than they 

IS 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

have in any of these countries. Our statesmen are but 
children by the side of Gladstone or Bismarck. We are 
all too familiar with the American type of "statesman." 
The cross-ties of the railroads which lead in every 
direction out of Washington are every fourth year 
graven with the prints of his returning boot-heels. He 
is the butt of our national jokes, as well as the sign 
of our national shame ! We have been too busy chop- 
ping our trees and breaking our prairies to educate our 
sons. Thus it comes, that in literature, in science, in 
philosophy, in everything except mechanical invention, 
American work has been contented to bear the stamp 
of mediocrity. 

This is not so true as it was a few years ago; for 
Young America has made great strides toward the 
front in all these fields within the last twenty years. 
But it should not be true to any extent at all. Nowhere 
in the world, I believe, is the raw material out of which 
scholars and statesmen should be made so abundant as 
in America. Nowhere is native intelligence and energy 
so plentiful ; but far too often does it waste itself in 
unworthy achievement. The journalist Sala says that 
''nowhere in the world is so much talent lying around 
loose as in America." In other words, in no other 
country are so many men of natural ability who fail 
in effectiveness in life for want of proper training. 

In the different training-schools of California, large 
and small, nearly two thousand young people are 
gathered together to prepare for the profession of 
teaching. Of these, not one in fifty remains in school 

16 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

long enough to secure even the rudiments of a Hberal 
education. Fifteen minutes for dinner; fifty weeks 
for an education! For the lowest grades of schools, 
there are candidates by the hundred ; but when one of 
our really good schools wants a man for a man's 
work, it can make no use of these teachers. We must 
search far and wide for the man to whom a present 
offer of fifty dollars a month has not seemed more 
important than all the grand opportunities the scholar 
may receive. Many of our young teachers are making 
a mistake in this regard. Every year the demand for 
educated men and women in our profession is growing. 
Every year scores of half-educated teachers are 
crowded out of their places to make way for younger 
men who have the training which the coming years 
demand. What kind of a teacher do you mean to be? 
One who has a basis of culture, and will grow as the 
years go on, or one with nothing in him, who will hang 
on, a burden to the profession, until he is finally 
turned out to starve ? What is the use of preparing for 
certain failure ? The bird in the hand is not worth ten 
in the bush. You cannot afford to sell your future at 
so heavy a discount. 

The general purpose of public education, it is said, 
is the elevation of the masses. This is well ; but as the 
man is above the mass, there is a higher aim than this. 
Training of the individual is to break up the masses, 
to draw from the multitude the man. We see a regi- 
ment of soldiers on parade — a thousand men ; in dress 
and mein all are alike — ^the mass. To the sound of the 

17 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

drum or the command of the officer, they move as one 
man. By and by, in the business of war, comes the 
cry for a man to lead some forlorn hope, to do some 
deed of bravery in the face of danger. From the 
mass steps the man. His training shows itself. On 
parade, no more, no less than the others; he stands 
above them all on the day of trial. So, too, in other 
things, in other places; for the need of men is not 
alone on the field of battle. 

Some fifty thousand boys are to-day at play on the 
fields of California. Which of these shall be the great, 
the good of California's next century? Which of these 
shall redeem our State from its vassalage to the saloon 
and the spoilsman? Which of these shall be a center 
of sweetness and light; so that the world shall say, 
"It is good to have lived in California." Good not 
alone for the climate, the mountains, the forest, and the 
sea, the thousand beauties of nature which make our 
State so lovable ; but good because life in California is 
life among the best and truest of men and women. 
This record California has yet to make; and there are 
some among you, I trust, who will live to help make it. 

These fifty thousand boys form a part of what will 
be the masses. Let us train them as well as we can. 
Let us feed them well. Let us send them to school. 
Let us make them wise, intelligent, clean, honest, 
thrifty. Among them here and there is the future 
leader of men. Let us raise him from the masses, or, 
rather, let us give him a chance to raise himself; for 
the pine-tree in the thicket needs no outside help to 

18 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

place its head above the chaparral and sumac. To 
break up the masses, that they may be masses no more, 
but living men and women, is the mission of higher 
education. 

In medicine, America is still the paradise of quacks. 
In law, the land is full of shysters and pettifoggers, 
and doers of "fine work"; but of good lawyers, the 
supply never equals the demand. In education, no land 
is so full as America of frauds and shams. The cata- 
logues of our schools read like the advertisements of 
our patent medicines. They "cure all ills that flesh 
is heir to ; one bottle sufficient !" The name "Univer- 
sity in America is assumed by the cross-roads academy 
as well as by Harvard or Johns Hopkins. The name 
"Professor" is applied to the country schoolmaster, 
the barber, and the manager of the skating-rink. The 
bachelor's diploma in half our States is given by con- 
sent of law to those who could not pass the examina- 
tions of any decent high school. Such diplomas do not 
ennoble their holders, but they do serve to bring into 
contempt the very name of American graduate. 

One of the besetting sins of American life is its 
willingness to call very little things by very large 
names — its tolerance of imposition and fraud. It is 
the mission of the scholar in each profession to combat 
fraud; to show men "facts amid appearances"; to 
say that a pop-gun is a pop-gun, though every one else 
may be calling it a cannon! As our country grows 
older, perhaps the number of bladders will diminish. 
If not, let us have more pins ! 

19 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

What does the college do for the moral, the religious 
training of the youth? Let us examine. If your col- 
lege assume to stand in loco parentis^ with rod in hand 
and spy-glasses on its nose, it will not do much in the 
way of moral training. The fear of punishment will 
not make young men moral and religious; still less a 
punishment so easily evaded as the discipline of the 
college. 

If your college claims to be a reform school, your 
professors detective officers, and your president a chief 
of police, the students will give them plenty to do. A 
college cannot take the place of the parent. To claim 
that it does so, is a mere pretense. It can cure the boy 
of petty vices and trickery only by making him a 
man, by giving him higher ideals, more serious views 
of life. You may win by inspiration, not by fear. 

Take those dozen students, of whom Agassiz tells 
us — his associates in the University of Munich. Do 
you suppose that Dr. DoUinger caught any of them 
cheating on examination? Did the three young men 
who knelt under the haystack at Williamstown, — 
the founders of our Foreign Missions, — choose the hay- 
stack rather than the billiard-hall, for fear of the col- 
lege faculty? "Free should the scholar be, free and 
brave." "The petty restraints that may aid in the 
control of college sneaks and college snobs are an 
insult to college men and women." And it is for the 
training of men and women that the college exists. 

So, too, in religious matters. The college can do 
much, but not by rules and regulations. The college 

20 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

will not make young men religious by enforced attend- 
ance at church or prayer-meeting. It will not awaken 
the spiritual element in the student's nature by any sys- 
tem of demerit-marks. This the college can do for 
religious culture : It can strengthen the student in his 
search for truth. It can encourage manliness in him by 
the putting away of childish things. Let the thoughts 
of the student be as free as the air. Let him prove 
all things, and he will hold fast to that which is good. 
Give him a message to speak to other men, and when 
he leaves your care you need fear for him not the 
world, the flesh, nor the Devil ! 

This is a practical age, we say, and we look askance 
at dreams and ideals. We ask now : What is the value 
of education? What is the value of Christianity? 
What is the value of love, of God, of morality, of 
truth, of beauty? — as though all these things were 
for sale in our city markets, somewhat shop-worn and 
going at a sacrifice. 

''My son," says Victor Cherbuliez, "my son, we 
ought to lay up a stock of absurd enthusiasms in our 
youth, or else we shall reach the end of our journey 
with an empty heart; for we lose a great many of 
them by the way." 

It is the noblest mission of all higher education, I 
believe, to fill the mind of the youth with these 
enthusiasms, with noble ideas of manhood, of work, 
of life. It should teach him to feel that life is indeed 
worth living; and no one who leads a worthy life has 
ever for a moment doubted this. It should help him to 

21 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

shape his own ambitions as to how a Hfe may be made 
worthy. It should help him to believe that love, and 
friendship, and faith, and devotion are things that 
really exist, and are embodied in men and women. 
He should learn to know these men and women, 
whether of the present or of the past, and his life will 
become insensibly fashioned after theirs. He should 
form plans of his own work for society, for science, 
for art, for religion. His life may fall far short of 
what he would make it; but a high ideal must precede 
any worthy achievement. 

A conviction or ideal in life must be a determina- 
tion to work and live toward some end. It must 
express itself in action. It is destructive of mind and 
soul if an ideal stands in the place of effort. No visions 
and dreams uncontrolled by the will can be treated as 
independent sources of knowledge or power. 

I once climbed a mountain slope in Utah, in mid- 
summer, when every blade of grass was burned to a 
yellow crisp. I look over the valley, and here and 
there I can trace a line of vivid green across the 
fields, running down to the lake. I cannot see the 
water, but I know that that brook is there; for the 
grass would not grow without help. Like this brook 
in the hot plains, may be the life of the scholar in the 
world of men. 

I look out over the struggling men and women. I 
see the weary soul, the lost ambitions, 

"The haggard face, the form that drooped and 
fainted 

In the fierce race for wealth." 

22 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 



Here and there I trace some line in life along which 
I see springing up all things good and gracious. Here 
is the scholar's work. In his pathway are all things 
beautiful and true— the love of nature, the love of 
man, the love of God. For best of all the scholar's 
privileges is that of "lending a hand." The scholar 
travels the road of life well equipped in all which can 
be helpful to others. He may not travel that road 
again (you remember the words of the old Quaker), 
and what he does for his neighbor must be done where 
his neighbor is. The noblest lives have left their traces, 
not only in literature or in history, but in the hearts 
of men. "If the teacher is to train others, still more 
must he train himself. The teacher's influence depends 
not on what he says, nor on what he does, but on what 
he is. He cannot be greater or nobler than himself. 
He cannot teach nobly if he is not himself noble."* 

Not long ago. Professor William Lowe Bryan said : 
"Two summers since, in a Southern Indiana country 
neighborhood, I came upon the traces of a man. They 
were quite as distinct and satisfactory as a geologist 
could have wished for in the case of a vanished glacier. 
A good many years had passed away since the man was' 
there, but the impression of his mind and character 
was still unmistakable. Long ago, when a boy of 
eighteen, with no special training and no extended 
education, this man went to Jefferson County to teach. 
What he did, what he said, what methods of text- 
books he used, what books or journals he read, I do 

*Dr. Weldon, Head Master of Harrow. 



23 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

not know. But if you will go there to-day, you will 
find in that community, among all classes and con- 
ditions of people, the most satisfactory evidence that 
that boy-teacher was a man, honest, sincere, energetic, 
inspiring." 

So have I found, as I have gone over this land of 
ours, traces here and there which show where a man 
has lived. In greater or less degree, as we come to 
know the inner history of some little town, we may 
find that from some past life its sons and daughters 
have drawn their inspiration; we may find that once 
within its borders there lived a man. 

One word more : You will go to college, for better 
or for worse. Where shall you go? The answer to 
this is simple. Get the best you can. You have but 
one chance for a college education, and you cannot 
afford to waste that chance on a third-rate or fourth- 
rate school. There is but one thing that can make a 
college strong and useful, and that is a strong and 
earnest faculty. All other matters without this are of 
less than no importance. 

Buildings, departments, museums, courses, libraries, 
catalogues, names, numbers, rules, and regulations do 
not make a university. It is the men who teach. Go 
where the masters are, in whatever department you 
wish to study. 

Look over this matter carefully ; for it is important. 
Go for your education to that school, in whatever 
State or country, under whatever name or control, 
that will serve your purposes best; that will give you 

24 



THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 



the best returns for the money you are able to spend. 
Do not stop with the middle-men. Go to the men 
who know; the men who can lead you beyond the 
primary details to the thoughts and researches which 
are the work of the scholar. 

Far more important than the question of what you 
shall study is the question of who shall be your teach- 
ers. The teacher should not be a self-registering 
phonograph to put black marks after the names of the 
lazy boys. He should be a source of inspiration, lead- 
ing the student in his department to the farthest limit 
of what is already known, inciting him to make excur- 
sions in the greater realms of the unknown. A great 
teacher never fails to leave a great mark on every 
youth with whom he comes in contact. 

Let the school do for you what it can; and when 
you have entered upon the serious duties of life, let 
your own work and your own influence in the com- 
munity be ever the strongest plea that can be urged 
in behalf of higher education. 



25 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN* 

IF the experiment of government by the people is 
to be successful, it is you and such as you who 
must make it so. The future of the republic 
must lie in the hands of the men and women of 
culture and intelligence, of self-control and of self- 
resource, capable of taking care of themselves and of 
helping others. If it falls not into such hands, the 
republic will have no future. Wisdom and strength 
must go to the making of a nation. There is no virtue 
in democracy as such, nothing in Americanism as such, 
that will save us, if we are a nation of weaklings and 
fools, with an aristocracy of knaves as our masters. 

There are some who think that this is the condition 
of America today. There are some who think that 
this republic, which has weathered so nobly the storms 
of war and of peace, will go down on the shoals of hard 
times; that we, as a nation, cannot live through the 
nervous exhaustion induced by the financial sprees 
of ourselves and others. We are told that our civili- 
zation and our government are fit only for the days 
of cotton and corn prosperity. We are told that our 
whole industrial system, and the civilization of which 
it forms a part, must be torn up by the roots and cast 
away. We are told that the days of self-control and 
self-sufficiency are over, and that the people of this 
nation are really typified by the lawless bands rushing 

* Address to the class of 1894, Leland Stanford Junior University; 
published in the Popular Science Monthly, December, 1894. 

27 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN 



blindly hither and thither, clamoring for laws by which 
those men may be made rich whom all previous laws 
of God and man have ordained to be poor. 

In these times it is well for us to remember that we 
come of hardy stock. The Anglo-Saxon race, with its 
strength and virtues, was born of hard times. It is 
not easily kept down; the victims of oppression must 
be of some other stock. We who live in America, and 
who constitute the heart of this republic, are the sons 
and daughters of "him that overcometh." Ours is a 
lineage untainted by luxury, uncoddled by charity, 
uncorroded by vice, uncrushed by oppression. If it 
were not so, we could not be here to-day. 

When this nation was born, the days of the govern- 
ment of royalty and aristocracy were fast drawing to a 
close. Hereditary idleness had steadily done its work, 
and the scepter was already falling from nerveless 
hands. God said: "I am tired of kings; I suffer 
them no more." And when the kings had slipped from 
their tottering thrones, as there was no one else to rule, 
the scepter fell into the hands of the common man. 
It fell into our hands, ours of this passing generation, 
and from us it will pass on into yours. You are here 
to make ready for your coronation, to learn those 
maxims of government, those laws of human nature, 
without which all administrations must fail ; ignorance 
of which is always punishable by death. If you are to 
hold this scepter, you must be wiser and stronger than 
the kings ; else you, too, shall lose the scepter as they 
have lost it, and your dynasty shall pass away. 

28 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN 



For more than a century now the common man has 
ruled America. How has he used his power? What 
does history tell us of what the common man has done ? 
It is too soon to answer these questions. A hundred 
years is a time too short for the test of such gigantic 
experiments. Here in America we have made history 
already — some of it glorious, some of it ignoble ; much 
of it made up of the old stories told over again. We 
have learned some things that we did not expect to 
learn. We find that the social problems of Europe are 
not kept away from us by the quarantine of democracy. 
We find that the dead which the dead past cannot bury 
are thrown up on our shores. We find that weakness, 
misery, and crime are still with us, and that wherever 
weakness is there is tyranny also. The essence of 
tyranny, we have found, lies not in the strength of the 
strong, but in the weakness of the weak. We find that 
in the free air of America there are still millions who 
are not free — millions who can never be free under any 
government or under any laws, so long as they remain 
what they are. 

The remedy for oppression, then, is to bring in 
better men, men who cannot be oppressed. This is the 
remedy our fathers sought; we shall find no other. 
The problem of life is not to make life easier, but to 
make men stronger, so that no problem shall be beyond 
their solution. It will be a sad day for the republic 
when life is easy for ignorance, indolence, and apathy. 
It is growing easier than it was ; it is too easy already. 
There is no growth without its struggle. Nature asks 

29 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN 



of man that he use his manhood. If a man puts no part 
of his brain and soul into his daily work — if he feels no 
pride in the part he is taking in life, — the sooner he 
leaves the world the better. His work is the work of a 
slave, and his life the waste of so much good oxygen. 
The misery he endures is nature's testimony to his 
worthlessness. We cannot save him from nature's 
penalties. Our duty toward him may be to temper 
justice with mercy. This is not the matter of import- 
ance. Our duty toward his children is to see that they 
do not follow his path. The grown-up men and women 
of today are, in a sense, past saving. The best work 
of the republic is to save the children. The one great 
duty of a free nation is education — education, wise, 
thorough, universal; the education, not of cramming, 
but of training; the education which no republic has 
ever given, and without which all republics must be in 
whole or in part failures. If this generation should 
leave as its legacy to the next the real education, train- 
ing in individual power and skill, breadth of outlook 
on the world and on life, the problems of the next cen- 
tury would take care of themselves. There can be no 
collective industrial problem where each man is capable 
of solving his own individual problem for himself. 

In this direction lies, I believe, the key to all indus- 
trial and social problems. Reforms in education are 
the greatest of all reforms. The ideal education must 
meet two demands : It must be personal, fitting a man 
or woman for success in life ; it must be broad, giving 
a man or woman such an outlook on the world as that 



30 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN 

this success may be worthy. It should give to each man 
or woman that reserve strength without which no Hfe 
can be successful, because no life can be free. With 
this reserve the man can face difficulties, because the 
victor in any struggle is he who has the most staying 
power. With this reserve, he is on the side of law and 
order, because only he who has nothing to lose can 
favor disorder or misrule. He should have a reserve of 
property. Thrift is a virtue. No people can long be 
free who are not thrifty. It is true that thrift some- 
times passes beyond virtue, degenerating into a vice of 
greed. Because there are men who are greedy — 
drunk with the intoxication of wealth and power — 
we sometimes are told that wealth and power are 
criminal. There are some who hold that thrift is 
folly and personal ownership a crime. In the new 
Utopia all is to be for all, and no one can claim a 
monopoly, not even of himself. There may be worlds 
in which this shall be true. It is not true in the world 
into which you have been born. Nor can it be. In 
the world we know, the free man should have a reserve 
of power, and this power is represented by money. If 
thrift ever ceases to be a virtue, it will be at a time long 
in the future. Before that time comes, our Anglo- 
Saxon race will have passed away and our civilization 
will be forgotten. The dream of perfect slavery must 
find its realization in some other world than ours, or 
with a race of men cast in some other mold. 

A man should have a reserve of skill. If he can do 
well something which needs doing, his place in the 

31 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN 



world will always be ready for him. He must have 
intelligence. If he knows enough to be good company 
for himself and others, he is a long way on the road 
toward happiness and usefulness. To meet this need 
our schools have been steadily broadening. The busi- 
ness of education is no longer to train gentlemen and 
clergymen, as it was in England; to fit men for the 
professions called learned, as it has been in America. 
It is to give wisdom and fitness to the common man. 
The great reforms in education have all lain in the 
removal of barriers. They have opened new lines of 
growth to the common man. This form of university 
extension is just beginning. The next century will 
see its continuance. It will see a change in educational 
ideas greater even than those of the revival of learning. 
Higher education will cease to be the badge of a caste, 
and no line of usefulness in life will be beyond its 
helping influence. 

The man must have a reserve of character and pur- 
pose. He must have a reserve of reputation. Let 
others think well of us; it will help us to think well 
of ourselves. No man is free who has not his own 
good opinion. A man will wear a clean conscience as 
he would a clean shirt, if he knows his neighbors expect 
it. He must have a reserve of love, and this is won by 
service to others. ''He that brings sunshine into the 
lives of others cannot keep it from himself." He must 
form the ties of family and friendship; that, having 
something at stake in the goodness of the world, he will 
do something toward making the world really good. 

32 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN 



When an American citizen has reserves like these, he 
has no need to beg for special favors. All he asks of 
legislation is that it keep out of his way. He demands 
no form of special guardianship or protection. He can 
pay as he goes. The man who cannot has no right to 
go. Of all forms of greed, the greed for free lunches — 
the desire to get something for nothing — is the most 
demoralizing, and in the long run most dangerous. 

The flag of freedom can never float over a nation of 
deadheads. 

Then, again, education must take the form of real 
patriotism — of public interest and of civic virtue. If 
a republic be not wisely managed, it will fail as any 
other corporation would; it will only succeed as it 
deserves success. 

The problems of government are questions of right 
and wrong ; they can be settled only in one way. They 
must be settled right. Whatever is settled wrong comes 
up for settlement again, and this when we least expect 
it. It comes up under harder conditions, and com- 
pound interest is charged on every wrong decision. 
The slavery question, you remember, was settled over 
and over again by each generation of compromisers. 
When they led John Brown to the scaffold, his last 
words were: "You would better — all you people of 
the South — prepare yourselves for a settlement of this 
question, that must come up for a settlement again 
sooner than you are prepared for it. You may dispose 
of me now very easily," he said; "I am nearly disposed 

33 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN 

of now; but this question is still to be settled — this 
negro question, I mean ; the end of that is not yet." 

This, John Brown said, and they settled the problem 
for the time by hanging him. But the question rose 
again. It was never settled until at last it was "blown 
hellward from the cannon's mouth." Then it was 
found that for every drop of negro blood drawn by 
the lash, a thousand drops of Saxon blood had been 
drawn by the sword. 

Thus it is with every national question, large or 
small. Thus it will be with the tariff, with finance, 
with the civil service. Each question must be settled 
right, and we must pay for its settlement. It is said 
that fifteen per cent of the laws on the statute books 
of the States of the Union stand there in defiance of 
acknowledged laws of social and economic science. 
Every such statute is blood poison in the body politic. 
Around every such law will gather a festering sore. 
Every attempt to heal this sore will be resisted by the 
full force of the time-servers. Such statutes are stead- 
ily increasing in number — concessions by short-sighted 
legislatures to the arrogant monopolist, the ignorant 
demagogue, or the reckless agitator. This must stop. 
"They enslave their children's children who make 
compromise with sin," or with ignorance, or with 
recklessness. "The gods," said Marcus Aurelius, "are 
at the head of the administration, and will have noth- 
ing but the best." 

"My will fulfilled shall be; 
In daylight or in dark, 
My thunderbolt has eyes to see 
Its way home to the mark!" 
34 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN 



It was the dream of the founders of this Republic 
that each year the people should choose from their 
number ''their wisest men to make the public laws." 
This was actually done in the early days ; for our first 
leaders were natural leaders. The men who founded 
America were her educated men. None other could 
have done it. But this condition could not always last. 
As the country grew, ignorance came and greed 
developed; ignorance and greed must be represented, 
else ours would not be a representative government. 
So to our Congresses our people sent, not the wisest, 
but the men who thought as the people did. We have 
come to choose, in our law-makers, not rulers, but 
representatives; we ask not wisdom, but watchfulness 
for our personal interests. So we send those whose 
interests are ours; those who act as our attorneys. 
And just as the people do this, so do the great corpora- 
tions, who form a large part of the people and control 
a vastly larger part. And as the corporations com- 
mand the best service, they often send as their attor- 
neys abler men than the people can secure. And so it 
has come about that demagogues and special agents 
make up the body of lawmakers in this country, and 
this in both parties alike. They represent, not our 
wisdom, but our business. They are the reflex of the 
people they represent ; no better and certainly no worse. 
Those whose interest lies in the direction of good gov- 
ernment alone are too often unrepresented. 

In this degree republican government has failed. 
For this failure there is again but one remedy — educa- 

35 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN 



tion. If the people are to rule us, the people must be 
wise. We must have in every community men trained 
in social and political science. We must have men 
with the courage of their convictions; only education 
can give real convictions. We must have men who 
know there is a right to every question as well as 
many wrongs. We must have men who know what 
this right is; or, if not knowing, who know how the 
right may be found. Very few men ever do that 
which they know and really believe to be wrong. Most 
wrongdoing comes from a belief that there is no right, 
or that right and wrong are only relative. 

Professor Powers has said: "We are no longer 
guided by wise men. We are guided by wise men's 
wisdom after we have reviewed it and decided that it is 
wisdom. An increasing proportion of our people are 
fairly independent in their thought, and vigorous in 
their assertion of their convictions. These men — 
common human men — without their knowledge or 
consent, come into the world charged with the awful 
responsibility of managing interests compared with 
which the tasks of the old gods of Olympus were but 
as children's play." 

If representative government is ever to bring for- 
ward wisdom and patriotism, it will be because wisdom 
and patriotism exist and demand representation. In 
this direction lies one of the most important duties of 
the American university. Every question of public 
policy is a question of right and wrong. To such ques- 
tions all matters of party ascendency, all matters of 

36 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN 

individual advancement must yield precedence. There 
is no virtue in the voice of majorities. The danger of 
ignorance or indifference is only intensified when rolled 
up in majorities. Truth is strong, and error is weak, 
and the majorities of error melt away under the influ- 
ence of a few men whose right acting is based on right 
thinking. Right thinking has been your privilege; 
right acting is now your duty; and at no time in the 
history of the world has duty been more imperative 
than now. 



37 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE* 

THE very essence of republicanism is popu- 
lar education. There . is no virtue in the 
acts of ignorant majorities, unless by dint 
of repeated action the majority is no longer 
ignorant. The very work of ruling is in itself educa- 
tion. As Americans, we believe in government by the 
people. This is not that the people are the best of 
rulers, but because a growth in wisdom is sure to go 
with an increase in responsibility. 

The voice of the people is not the voice of God ; but 
if this voice be smothered, it becomes the voice of the 
demon. The red flag of the anarchist is woven where 
the people think in silence. In popular government, it 
has been said, ignorance has the same right to be 
represented as wisdom. This may be true, but the 
perpetuity of such government demands that this fact 
of representation should help to transform ignorance 
into wisdom. Majorities are generally wrong, but only 
through the experience of their mistakes is the way 
opened to the permanent establishment of right. The 
justification of the experiment of universal suffrage is 
the formation of a training-school in civics, which, in 
the long run, will bring about good government. 

Our fathers built for the future — a future even yet 
unrealized. America is not, has never been, the best 
governed of civilized nations. The iron-handed dicta- 

*Address given on Charter Day of the University of California, at 
Berkeley, March, 1893. 

39 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

torship of Germany is, in its way, a better government 
than our people have ever given us. That is, it fol- 
lows a more definite and consistent policy. Its affairs 
of state are conducted with greater economy, greater 
intelligence, and higher dignity than ours. It is above 
the influence of the two arch-enemies of the American 
State — ^the corruptionist and the spoilsman. If this 
were all, we might welcome a Bismarck as our ruler, 
in place of our succession of weak-armed and short- 
lived Presidents. 

But this is not all. It is not true in a changing world 
that that government "which is best administered is 
best." This is the maxim of tyranny. Good govern- 
ment may be a matter of secondary importance even. 
Our government by the people is for the people's 
growth. It is the great training-school in governmen- 
tal methods, and in the progress which it insures lies 
the certain pledge of better government in the future. 
This pledge, I believe, enables us to look with confi- 
dence on the gravest of political problems, problems 
which other nations have never solved, and which can 
be faced by no statesmanship other than 

"The right divine of man, 
The million trained to be free." 

And, in spite of all reaction and discouragement, every 

true American feels that this trust in the future is no 

idle boast. 

But popular education has higher aims than those 

involved in intelligent citizenship. No country can be 

truly well governed in which any person is prevented, 

40 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

either by interference or by neglect, from making the 
most of himself. "Of all state treasures," says Andrew 
D. White, "the genius and talent of citizens is the most 
precious. It is a duty of society to itself, a duty which 
it cannot throw off, to see that the stock of talent and 
genius in each generation may have a chance for devel- 
opment, that it may be added to the world's stock and 
aid in the world's work." 

This truth was recognized to its fullest degree by 
the founders of our Government, and so from the very 
first provision was made for popular education. The 
wisdom of this provision being recognized, our inquiry 
is this : How far should the State go in this regard ? 
Should popular education cease with the primary 
schools, or is it the duty of the State to maintain all 
parts of the educational system — primary schools, 
secondary schools, colleges, technical and professional 
schools, and the schools of instruction through investi- 
gation, to which belong the name of university? 

There have been from time immemorial two schools 
in political economy — two opposite tendencies in the 
administration of government; the one to magnify, 
the other to reduce the power and responsibility of the 
State. The one would regard the State as simply the 
board of police. Its chief function is the administra- 
tion of justice. In other matters it would stay its 
hands, leaving each man or institution to work out 
its own destiny in the struggle for existence. The 
weaker yield, the stronger move on. Progress must 
come from the inevitable survival of the fittest. "Lais- 

41 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

sez-faire," (let it alone) is the motto, in all times and 
conditions. 

The opposite tendency is to make the State not just, 
but benevolent. In its extreme the State would be- 
come a sort of generous uncle to every man within it. 
It would feed the hungry, clothe the needy, furnish 
work for the idle, bounties for those engaged in losing 
business, and protection for those who feel too keenly 
the competition inherent in the struggle for existence. 
It would make of the State a gigantic trust, in which 
all citizens might take part, and by which all should be 
lifted from the reach of poverty by official tugging at 
the common boot-strap. 

Somewhere between these two extremes, I believe, 
lies the line of a just policy. Aristotle says that "it is 
the duty of the state to accomplish every worthy end 
which it can reach better than private enterprise 
can do." Accepting this view of the State's duty, let 
us see to what extent education comes within its 
function. Education is surely a worthy object. Mill 
says: "In the matter of education, the intervention 
of government is justifiable, because the case is not 
one in which the interest and judgment of the con- 
sumer are a sufficient security for the goodness of the 
commodity." 

In other words, unless the State take the matter in 
hand and make provision for something better, a cheap 
or poor article of education may be furnished, to the 
injury of the people. This authority of the State over 
the lower schools has been jealously guarded by the 

42 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

American people, and the result of this care has been 
one of the chief objects of our national pride. On the 
other hand, the higher schools, and to a still greater 
degree the professional schools, of America, have been 
allowed to shift for themselves, in accordance with 
the doctrine of "laisses-faire!' What has been the 
result ? 

"The common school is the hope of our country." 
So we all agree, and this sentence stands on the letter- 
heads of half of the school officers in the West. It is 
the common-school education that elevates our masses 
above the dignity of a mob. Such slight knowledge at 
least is essential to the coherence of the State. 

"An illiterate mass of men, large or small," says 
President White, "is a mob. If such a mob had a 
hundred millions of heads — if it extends from ice to 
coral, it is none the less a mob: and the voice of a 
mob has been in all time evil ; for it has ever been the 
voice of a tyrant, conscious of power, unconscious of 
responsibility." 

"The great republics of antiquity and of the medie- 
val period failed," he continues, "for want of that en- 
lightenment which would enable their citizens to appre- 
ciate free institutions and maintain them. Most of 
the great efforts for republican institutions in modern 
times have been drowned in unreason, fanaticism, 
anarchy, and blood. No sense of responsibility can 
be brought to bear on a mob. It passes at one bound 
from extreme credulity toward demagogues to ex- 
treme skepticism toward statesmen; from mawkish 

43 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

sympathy toward criminals to bloodthirsty ferocity 
against the innocent, from the wildest rashness to the 
most abject fear. To rely on a constitution to control 
such a mob would be like relying on a cathedral organ 
to still the fury of a tornado. Build your constitution 
as lordly as you may, let its ground-tone of justice be 
the most profound, let its utterances of human right 
be trumpet-tongued, let its combination of checks and 
balances be the most subtle, yet what statesman shall so 
play upon its mighty keys as to still the howling tem- 
pest of party spirit, or sectional prejudice, or race 
hatreds, sweeping through an illiterate mob crowding 
a continent?" 

The reformer Zwingli saw three hundred years ago 
that Protestantism meant popular education, and popu- 
lar education meant republicanism. It meant popular 
education because the recognition of the right of the 
individual to form his own opinions made it the duty 
of the state to give him the means of making these 
opinions intelligent. It meant republicanism, because 
the right of private interpretation in religion gave the 
people the right to opinions of their own in matters of 
politics. Where the people have a mind, they must, 
sooner or later, have a voice. 

Long ago, at the end of the war, Edmund Kirke 
told us, in the Atlantic Monthly, the story of the life 
of a brave but unlettered scout, who served in Gar- 
field's army in Southern Kentucky — John Jordan, 
"from the head of Bayne."* The story, which was a 

*The Bayne is a small tributary of Licking River, in Kentucky. 

44 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 



true one, was designed to furnish a sort of running 
parallel between the lives of two brave and God-fear- 
ing men, supposed to be equal in ability, and equally 
lowly in birth. The one wore the general's epaulets, 
and still later, as we know, he became President of the 
United States, known and honored of all men. The 
other wore the rough homespun garb of the scout, 
and now that the war is over, he lies in an unknown 
grave in the Cumberland Mountains. And this differ- 
ence, so the story tells us, lay in this: "The free 
schools which Ohio gave the one, and of which Ken- 
tucky robbed the other!" "Plant a free school on 
every Southern cross-road," says Edmund Kirke, "and 
every Southern Jordan will become a Garfield. Then, 
and not till then, will the Union be redeemed." 

And so this is no idle phrase, "The common school 
is the hope of our country," and its maintenance is a 
worthy object of which the statesmanship of the people 
must not neglect. It is something by which all citizens 
are helped ; for in the end all interests are touched by 
it. 

It is too late to ask in America whether this result 
could be reached in no other way. Private benevolence, 
private enterprise, the interest of religious bodies, — 
none of these has been trusted by the American peo- 
ple as a substitute for its own concerted action. In 
the early history of the West, Judge David D. Banta 
tells us, "There were two red rags that required but 
little shaking to inflame the populace. One of these 
was sectarianism ; the other, aristocracy." Our young 

45 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

democracy was in constant fear lest one or the other 
of these evil influences should enter and dominate its 
schools. 

And even now, while the early prejudices have in 
great part passed away, our people are especially jeal- 
ous of any attempt on the part of any organization to 
turn the schools to its own ends. No church can touch 
them, and ultimately they are beyond the reach of any 
political party. Religion, morality, politics even, may 
be taught in them, but in the interest of religion, mor- 
ality, and politics alone — not to advance any political 
party or to increase the following of any religious sect 
or coalition of sects. In no matter is there greater 
unanimity of feeling among our people than in this, 
and he must be an ardent partisan, indeed, who does 
not feel it and respect it. 

From another quarter we hear this objection to 
popular education : The public schools render the poor 
discontented with poverty. The child of the common 
laborer is unwilling to remain common. The pride of 
Merrie England used to lie in this, that each peasant 
and workman was contented to be peasant and work- 
man. To those who inherited the good things of the 
realm, it was a constant pleasure to see the masses 
below them contented to remain there. 

But popular education breaks down the barriers of 
caste, and therefore increases the restlessness of those 
shut in by such barriers. The respect for hereditary 
rank and title is fast disappearing, even in conserva- 
tive England, to the great dismay of those who have 

46 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 



no claim to respect other than that which they had 
inherited. 

Nor has this spirit been wanting in America. My 
own great-grandfather, John Elderkin Waldo, said in 
Tolland, Connecticut, a century ago, that there would 
"never again be good times in New England till the 
laborer once more was willing to work all day for a 
sheep's head and pluck." That the good times were 
past was due, he thought, to the influence of "the 
little schoolhouses scattered over the hills, which were 
spreading the spirit of sedition and equality." 

But the progress of our country has been along the 
very lines which this good man so dreaded. The 
spirit of responsibility fostered by the little school- 
houses has become our surest safeguard against sedi- 
tion. The man who is intelligent and free has no 
impulse toward sedition, and for this reason, the 
people have the right to see that every child shall 
grow up intelligent and free. They must create their 
own schools, and they have the plain duty to them- 
selves in making education free to make it likewise 
compulsory. No child in America has the right to 
grow up ignorant. 

So, leaving the common schools to the State, shall 
the State's work stop there? Is further education 
different in its relations to the community? Does a 
special virtue attach to reading, writing, and arith- 
metic which is not found in Hterature, philosophy, his- 
tory, or science? And shall the State give only the 
first, and leave the others to shift for themselves ? 

47 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

In Europe, education has progressed from above 
downward. From the first, higher education has been 
under public control, and the maintenance of universi- 
ties is a state duty which few have ever questioned. 
The struggle for public control in England has con- 
cerned only the lower schools, not the universities. 
The school problem in England to-day is the absurd 
one of how to make education compulsory without at 
the same time making it free. 

In America the same traditions were inherited, and 
the founding of the first colleges on a basis of public 
funds came as a matter of course. The State univer- 
sity, maintained by direct taxation, has been a promi- 
nent factor in the organization of each State of the 
Union outside of the original thirteen, and most of the 
latter form no exception to the rule. And, with vary- 
ing fortunes, the growth of each one of these schools 
has kept pace with the growth of the commonwealth, 
of which it forms a part. 

Eighty years ago, when ignorance and selfishness 
held less sway in our legislatures than today, because 
the influence of a few men of ideas was proportion- 
ately greater, the Constitution of the infant State of 
Indiana provided that: "Whereas, knowledge and 
learning generally diffused through a community being 
essential to the preservation of a free government, 
and spreading the opportunities and advantages of 
education through the various parts of the country 
being highly conducive to this end, it shall be the duty" 
of the General Assembly to "pass such laws as shall 

48 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

be calculated to encourage intellectual, scientifical and 
agricultural improvement, by allowing rewards and 
immunities for the promotion and improvement of 
arts, sciences, commerce, manufactures, and natural 
history, and to countenance and encourage the prin- 
ciples of humanity, industry, and morality." To these 
ends the General Assembly was required "to provide, 
by law, for a general system of education, ascending 
in a regular gradation from township schools to a 
State university, wherein tuition shall be gratis and 
equally free to all." And all this was guarded by a 
further provision "for absolute freedom of worship, 
and that no religious test should ever be required as a 
qualification to any office of trust or profit," in the 
State of Indiana. 

It is evident from this that the pioneers of the 
West regarded the colleges as essentially public schools 
— as much so as the township schools, — and that no 
idea of separate control and support of the higher 
institutions was present in their minds. But the judg- 
ment of the fathers is ever open to reconsideration. 
That the last generation thought it wise that the State 
should provide for higher education is in itself no 
argument. What shall be our answer in the light of 
facts to-day? Let us recall the words of Aristotle: 
"It is the duty of the state to accomplish every worthy 
end which it can reach better than private effort 
can do." 

I do not need to plead for the value of higher edu- 
cation. The man who doubts this is beyond the reach 

49 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

of argument. The men who have made our country- 
are its educated men ; not alone its college graduates — 
for there is no special virtue in a college diploma — 
but men of broad views and high ideals, to give which 
is the end of higher education. 

Moses Coit Tyler, of Cornell University, has said 
that the men of the early American colleges made suc- 
cess in the Revolutionary War possible. Discussing 
the effect of the higher institutions of learning on 
colonial life, he observes : "Still another effect of the 
early colleges was on the political union and freedom 
of the colonies. To them we are indebted for Ameri- 
can liberty and independence. The colleges educated 
the people and hastened the advent of freedom by 
rearing the men who led the colonists in their upris- 
ing. It was a contest of brains ten years before the 
war. The colonies sent to their Congresses represen- 
tatives who began issuing state papers in which the 
King and Parliament expected to find crude argu- 
ments and railings. They were astonished to find in 
them, however, decency, firmness, and wisdom, solid- 
ity, reason, and sagacity. Chatham said: 'You will 
find nothing like it in the world. The histories of 
Greece and Rome give up nothing equal to it, and all 
attempts to force servitude on such a people will be 
useless.' And these men," continues Mr. Tyler, 
"were the 'boys' of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Colum- 
bia, and William and Mary." 

Dr. Angell has lately said that the history of Iowa 
is the history of her State university. The greatness 

50 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

of the State has come through the growth of the men 
the State has trained. If this be true of Iowa, how 
much more is it true of Michigan, Wisconsin, and 
Virginia, States which have shown more UberaHty 
toward higher education than Iowa has yet done. 

"The preliminary education which many of our 
strongest men have received," says President White, 
"leaves them simply beasts of prey. It has sharpened 
their claws and whetted their tusks. A higher educa- 
tion, whether in science, literature, or history, not only 
sharpens a man's faculties, but gives him new exem- 
plars and ideals. He is lifted to a plane from which 
he can look down upon success in corruption with 
the scorn it deserves. The letting-down in character 
of our National and State councils, has notoriously 
increased just as the predominance of men of ad- 
vanced education in those councils has decreased. 
President Barnard's admirable paper showing the 
relatively diminishing number of men of advanced 
education in our public stations, decade by decade, 
marks no less the rise, decade by decade, of material 
corruption. This is no mere coincidence. There is a 
relation here of cause and effect." 

The common school is the hope of our country. In 
like manner, the high school and college are the hope 
of the common school, and the university the hope of 
the college. Each part of the system depends on the 
next higher for its standards and for its inspiration. 
From those educated in the higher schools the teach- 
ers in the lower must come. Lop off the upper 

51 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

branches of the tree, and the sap ceases to rise in its 
trunk. Cut off the higher schools from the educa- 
tional system, and its (growth and progress stop. 
Weakness at the head means paralysis of the members. 

In the early days, when, as Whittier tells us, ''the 
people sent their wisest men to make the public laws," 
the close relation of higher education to the public 
welfare was recognized by all. John Adams said: 
'Tt is to American seminaries of learning that America 
is indebted for her glory and prosperity." 

The early colleges were sustained, as a matter of 
course, either from public funds or from voluntary 
gifts, in which every man and woman took part. 
"The strongest colleges," says Professor Tyler again, 
"were not created by foreign patrons, but by the mass 
of the people. They were the children of poverty, 
self-sacrifice, and toil. Harvard sprang from the 
popular heart. In its early days, the families of all 
the colonies were invited to set apart, each person, an 
annual donation for the college, a peck of corn or 
twelvepence in money. And to this invitation all 
responded willingly." 

This direct connection of college and people was one 
of constant mutual advantage. It intensified the pub- 
lic interest in higher education, while it constrained 
the college to shape its work for the people's good. 
The high esteem accorded to the colleges led wealthy 
men to give them their attention. So it became with 
time the fashion to leave money by bequest to the 
colleges. In the older States, such money was usually 

52 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

given to the schools already established, and, through 
repeated bequests, some of these became comparatively 
wealthy and independent of the aid of the public 
funds. 

In the West and South, this generosity has shown 
itself rather in the founding of new institutions, in- 
stead of making the old ones strong. As the little 
towns of the forest and prairie grew into great cities, 
so it was supposed that, through some hidden force of 
vitality, the little colleges would grow into great uni- 
versities. This process of planting without watering 
has gone on until the whole country is dotted with 
schools, called by the name of college or university — 
on an average more than a dozen to each State. 
Some of these are well endowed, more ill endowed, 
and most not endowed at all. But rich or poor, weak 
or strong, each one serves in some way to perpetuate 
its founder's ideas and to preserve his name from 
oblivion. 

Many of these are honored names, the names of 
men who have loved learning and revered wisdom, 
and who have wished to help, in the only way possible 
to them, toward the discovery and dissemination of 
truth. Other names there are which can be honored 
only when the personality of their possessor is forgot- 
ten, men whose highest motive has been to secure a 
monument, more conspicuous, if not more enduring, 
than brass. The college founded by rich men, and 
obliged to depend on the gifts of rich men for its con- 
tinuance, is sometimes, though not always, forced into 

S3 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

degrading positions on account of favors received or 
favors expected. The officers of more than one of our 
colleges dare scarcely claim their souls as their own 
for fear of offending some wealthy patron. There is 
a college in New England of old and honored name, 
in which today the faculty go about with bated breath 
for fear of offending two wealthy spinsters in the 
town, whose money the college hopes to receive. 

This growing dependence on the large gifts of a 
few men tends to carry our colleges farther and far- 
ther from the people. A school supported wholly by 
the interest on endowments too often has little care for 
public opinion, and hence has little incentive to use its 
influence toward right opinions. Too often it ceases 
to respond to the spirit of the times. The Zeitgeist 
passes it by. It becomes the headquarters of conser- 
vatism, and within its walls ancient methods and obso- 
lete modes of thought are perpetuated. Such colleges 
need what Lincoln called a "bath of the people" — a 
contact with that humanity for whose improvement 
the college exists, and which it should be the mission 
of the college to elevate and inspire. Endowments, 
independent of popular influence, may become fatal to 
aggressiveness and to inspiration, however much they 
may give of material aid to the work of investigation. 

It is not a misfortune to a college that it should be 
dependent on the will of the people it serves. The 
pioneer school in the education of women (Mount 
Holyoke Seminary), has to this day neither patron 
nor great endowment. Its founder was a woman, rich 

54 



tHE SCHOOL And the state 

only in zeal, who gave all that she had — her life — to 
the cause of the education of girls. Mary Lyon's 
appeal was not to a few rich men to give a hundred 
thousand apiece, the proceeds of some successful deal 
in stocks or margins, but to the farmers, clergymen, 
mechanics, and shopkeepers of New England to give 
each the little he could spare. The prayers, and tears, 
and good wishes, and scanty dollars of thousands of 
good people gave to this school of faith and hope a 
most substantial foundation. 

Huber says of the University of Oxford, that when 
it had neither buildings nor land, "its intellectual 
importance was fully acknowledged." When it re- 
ceived vast privileges, and vast endowments, its intel- 
lectual prominence was obscured by the growth of 
forms, conventionalities, and sinecures. It became the 
stronghold of conservatism, of reaction against mod- 
ern civilization and modern science. 

Darwin speaks of the instruction in the English 
universities in his time as "incredibly dull," and in 
almost all of their departments an absolute waste of 
the student's time. "Half of the professors of Ox- 
ford," said a graduate of one of its colleges to me only 
a few days ago, "live on their stipends and simply 
soak." The struggle for existence is the basis of 
progress. Let all the professors in a university be 
placed beyond the reach of this struggle, and the influ- 
ence of the university rapidly deteriorates. It is a 
law of nature, from which nothing can escape. What- 
ever is alive must show a reason for living. 

55 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

Not long ago Dr. Dollinger said in the University 
of Munich that there was not in all America a school 
which rose to the rank of a third-rate German univer- 
sity. This may be true, so far as privileges and en- 
dowments go, for the wolf is close to the door of even 
our richest colleges. But the usefulness of the col- 
lege is not gauged by its size, nor by its material 
equipment. Ernst Haeckel, professor in the third- 
class University of Jena, tells us that the amount of 
original investigation done in a university is usually 
in inverse ratio to the costliness of its equipments. In 
this paradox there is a basis of truth. 

We speak too often of the university and of its 
powers or needs, as though the school were a separate 
creature, existing for its own sake. The university 
exists only in the teachers which compose it and direct 
its activities. It exists for the benefit of its students, 
and through them for the benefit of the community, in 
the extension of culture and the increase in the sum 
of human knowledge. Its only gain is in making this 
benefit greater; its only loss is in the diminution or 
deterioration of its influence. All questions of wealth 
and equipment are wholly subsidiary to this. The 
value of the university, then, is not in proportion to 
its bigness, but to its inspiration. The Good Spirit 
cares not for the size of its buildings or the length 
of its list of professors or students. It only asks, in 
the words of the old reformer, Ulrich von Hiitten, if 
"die Luft der Freiheit weht?" — whether "the winds 
of freedom are blowing." 

56 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 



Doubtless, wealthy men would grade our roads, 
build our courthouses, conduct our courts— do any- 
thing for the public good,— if the State should neglect 
these matters, or turn them over to private hands. 
But this would not release the People from their duty 
in this matter. The people have safety only in inde- 
pendence. "There is," says President White, "no 
system more unrepublican than that by which a nation 
or a State, in consideration of a few hundreds or 
thousands of dollars, delivers over its system of ad- 
vanced instruction to be controlled and limited by the 
dogmas and whims of living donors or dead testators. 
In more than one Nation dead hands, stretching out 
from graves closed generations gone, have lain with 
a deadly chill upon institutions for advanced instruc- 
tion during centuries. More than one institution in 
our own country has felt its grip and chill. If we 
ought to govern ourselves in anything, it ought to be 
in this." We should trust the people to judge their 
own needs, and should have faith that eventually no 
real need will be left unsatisfied. 

But may we not depend upon the interests of some 
one or more of our religious organizations to furnish 
the means of higher education? One of our great 
religious bodies, at least, stands ready to relieve the 
State of all responsibility for education, higher or 
lower, if it may be allowed to educate in its own way. 
But the people are not willing that this should be so. 
They believe that the public school should be free 
from all sectarian influences of whatever sort. The 

57 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

other religious bodies in our midst, for the most part, 
disclaim all desire, as well as all power, to provide 
for lower education, preferring to spend their strength 
on the higher. This is apparently not on account of 
the superior importance of collegiate education, nor 
because denominational influences are stronger on 
young men than on boys. It is simply because a col- 
lege is less expensive, and can be more definitely con- 
trolled than can a system of lower schools. 

I shall have little to say on the subject of denomi- 
national colleges, and nothing by way of criticism. If 
they do not stand in the way of schools of higher pur- 
pose and better equipment, they can do no harm. If 
again, like Yale and Harvard, they become trans- 
formed into schools of the broadest purpose, they 
cease to be, whether in name or not, denominational, 
but become, in fact, schools of the State. Very many 
of the denominational schools have been well equipped 
and well manned, and have fought a good fight for 
sound learning, as well as for the belief which their 
founders have deemed correct. But in too many of 
them the zeal of the founders has outrun their 
strength, and a pretense of doing on the part of a few 
half-starved professors has taken the place of real 
performance. 

It is certainly fair to say this of all the denomina- 
tional colleges of America: The higher education of 
youth, pure and simple, is not, cannot be, their chief 
object. Such schools are founded primarily to pro- 
mote the growth and preservation of certain religious 

58 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

organizations. This is a worthy object, as all must 
admit; but this purpose we recognize as something 
other than simply education. 

I read not long ago an appeal from the president of 
one of our best denominational colleges. Its burden 
was this: "Unless you are willing to see our church 
disappear from the West, do not let our college die." 
This recognizes the ultimate function of the denomi- 
national college. The church depends upon it for its 
educated men. It should furnish the leaders for the 
church; and the better trained these leaders are, the 
better for all the people. 

But this phase of education is not the State's work ; 
and so no private school or church school can enter 
the State's scheme of education. To do the State's 
work, the denominational school must cease to do its 
own; for no organization can be allowed to color the 
water in the fountains of popular education. Our bill 
of rights, the State Constitution, recognizes the equal 
rights of all men, whatever their religious belief or 
preference. This could not be the fact, if the scheme 
for higher education included sectarian colleges only; 
and all schools are sectarian in which the ruling body 
belongs by necessity and by right to some particular 
religious denomination. 

If the State has any duty toward higher education, 
the existence of denominational colleges does not re- 
lease it from this duty, any more than the existence of 
Pinkerton's band of peacemakers absolves the State 
from its duty to maintain an efficient police system. 

59 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

It is the free investigation and promulgation of truth 
which is the function of the university.. But the de- 
nominational school must also stand for the defense of 
certain doctrines as the ultimate truth. The highest 
work demands absolute singleness of purpose. The 
school cannot serve two masters ; and the school main- 
tained for the special work of the part cannot meet 
the needs of the whole. 

The most unfortunate feature of higher education in 
America lies in the universal scattering of its educa- 
tional resources. For this local pride and denomina- 
tional zeal are about equally responsible. If it be true, 
as Dr. DolHnger says, that among our four hundred 
American colleges and universities there is not one 
worthy to rank with the least of the eight maintained 
by the Kingdom of Prussia, whom have we to thank 
for this? Not our poverty, for New York, Pennsyl- 
vania, Ohio, and Illinois are not poor, even in com- 
parison with Prussia; not our parsimony, for no 
people give more freely than we; not our youth, for 
more than half these schools are older than the great 
University of Berlin. It has been this, and this alone 
: — the scattering of educational funds, public and pri- 
vate, at the demand of local ambition or local jealousy. 
It has been the creation in each State of a host of little 
colleges, each one ambitious to control the higher edu- 
cation of its vicinity, and each one more or less defi- 
nitely standing in the way of any other school which 
might rise to something better. Let us take an 
example : 

60 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 



It was not in response to the educational needs of 
Kansas that four universities were founded in a single 
year in one of its real estate towns, institutions without 
money and without credit, whose existence can be only 
one long wail for help from the rich men or rich 
denominations under whose patronage they are. 
There is a little college in the West, almost under 
the shadow of an excellent State University, which for 
years sent forth its appeals for help to denominational 
friends in the East, on the ground that it is the "sole 
educational oasis" in the great State in which it was 
located. We have not reached the end of this. The 
number of our colleges has doubled within the last 
thirty years, and the increase in number still goes on, 
far outrunning the rate of improvement in quality. 

"Within the last twenty years," said President 
White in 1874, "I have seen many of these institutions, 
and I freely confess that my observations have sad- 
dened me. Go from one great State to another, and 
you shall find that this unfortunate system has pro- 
duced the same miserable results— in the vast major- 
ity of our States not a single college or university 
worthy the name; only a multitude of little schools 
with pompous names and poor equipments, each doing 
its best to prevent the establishment of any institution 
broader and better. The traveler arriving in our great 
cities generally lands in a railway station costing more 
than all the university edifices of the State. He sleeps 
in a hotel in which there is embanked more capital 
than in the entire university endowment for millions 

61 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

of people. He visits asylums for lunatics, idiots, deaf, 
dumb, blind, — nay, even for the pauper and crimi- 
nal, — and finds them palaces. He visits the college 
buildings for young men of sound mind and earnest 
purpose, the dearest treasures of the State, and he 
generally finds them rude barracks. 

"Many noble men stand in the faculties of these 
colleges — men who would do honor to any institution 
of advanced learning in the world. These men of 
ours would, under a better system, develop admirably 
the intellectual treasures of our people and the mate- 
rial resources of our country; but, cramped by want 
of books, want of apparatus, want of everything 
needed in advanced instruction, cramped above all by 
the spirit of this system, very many of them have been 
paralyzed." 

This picture is by no means so dark in the West 
today as it was twenty-five years ago. And the rea- 
son for this is to be found in the rise of the State 
universities. These schools have struggled along 
with many variations of fortune until within the last 
few years, when success has come to every one of 
them, and their development has become the most 
striking feature in our recent educational history. 

When the State universities cast off the self-imposed 
fetters of the conventional college and took their place 
with the public schools, supported by the public money 
and existing for the public good, their real growth 
began in friends, in numbers, in equipment, in useful- 
ness. What they have deserved they have received, 

62 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

and they will receive in the future. It requires no 
prophet to foresee that before the middle of the next 
century these creatures of the public school system 
will be the centers of the chief educational forces on 
our continent. They will cost the people many hun- 
dred dollars, perhaps, for every one which is expended 
now; but every dollar given to higher education shall 
bring its full return. The greatness of the State is 
measured not by numbers nor by acres ; not by dollars 
on the tax-roll, but by the wisdom of its people, by the 
men and women of the State who have learned to take 
care of themselves. 

It is sometimes proposed to treat all higher educa- 
tion simply as a matter of business. Let wisdom be 
sold in the open market, and let its prices be ruled by 
the laws of supply and demand. The college profes- 
sor deals in mental wares, as the shopkeeper deals in 
material commodities. Let him fill his store with a 
stock which the people will buy, and advertise what 
he has, as the shopkeeper does. On this basis he will 
not carry a dead stock long. There is no room for 
conservatism in commerce. This is a commercial age, 
and professors should govern themselves accordingly. 
If the people want bookkeeping or dancing instead of 
Latin and Greek, they can have it. If the people 
retain the old prejudice in favor of classical training, 
they can have classical courses of the latest Chau- 
tauqua pattern, all in English, all the play left in and 
all the work left out. Busy people can then attend 
the universities without interruption of their daily 

63 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

work, while the law of supply and demand will regu- 
late everything. Commerce can have no difficulty in 
modernizing the curriculum. The latest fashions 
might be quoted in education as well as in millinery. 

This could have no result except to cheapen and 
vulgarize the college. The highest need is not the 
need of the many; still less is it the multitude's de- 
mand. Investigations without immediate pecuniary 
result would find still less encouragement than now. 
Vulgarity is the condition of satisfaction with inferior 
things. A college dependent each day on the day's 
receipts must pander to vulgarity. And vulgarity, 
too, is said to be the besetting sin of democracy. If 
democracy leads to vulgarity, it defeats its own ends. 
The justification of popular suffrage is to make the 
multitude better, not to bring the better to the level 
of the multitude. The many are ready only for the 
rudiments. The teacher of advanced subjects would 
starve in open financial competition, while the teacher 
who could train the many to keep account-books or to 
get a six-months' license would be exalted. If, on the 
other hand, the fees of the higher teacher were propor- 
tionately increased, only the rich could make use of 
him, and the rich would find their purposes better 
served in the endowed schools of other countries. 

The demand for many students rather than good 
ones, already too strong in our colleges, would be in- 
tensified, if everything were left to business competi- 
tion. The whole category of advertising dodges 
known to the dealers in quack medicines or ready- 

64 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 



made clothing would become a permanent part of our 
higher education. A cheap article furnished at a low 
price meets with a wonderful sale. We do not need 
to trust to theory in this matter. In Indiana, Ohio, 
Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas, are some two-score private 
schools called colleges. These schools are run with- 
out endowment or equipment on the plan of free com- 
petition, and for the purpose of making money. One 
has not to visit many of these to see clearly what 
would be the result of trusting higher education solely 
to business enterprise. Any form of educational char- 
ity, private gifts, public spirit, denominational zeal, 
anything leads to better results than this. For the 
essence of education is something that cannot be 
bought and sold. It is the inspiration of character, 
which cannot be rated in our stock exchanges. 

If quick sales and steady profits are to be the watch- 
word of educational progress, the student of the future 
will look toward Lebanon and Valparaiso, rather than 
toward Johns Hopkins or Harvard, and the great ex- 
penditures which New York, and Michigan, and Wis- 
consin, and California have made for higher educa- 
tion will be a needless waste. 

But it is said sometimes that the State cannot prop- 
erly manage its own institutions. Ignorance and 
venality are often dominant in public affairs, and it is 
claimed that work undertaken in the name of the 
people is sure to be marred by ignorance, affected by 
partisanship, or tainted by jobbery. The first profes- 
sor in the State University of Indiana, Baynard R. 

65 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

Hall, said sixty-five years ago: "Nothing, we incline 
to believe, can ever make State schools and colleges 
very good ones; but nothing can make them so bad 
as for Uncle Sam to leave every point open to debate, 
especially among ignorant, prejudiced, and selfish 
folks, in a new purchase." 

This question touches the very foundation of popu- 
lar government. In the beginning, as a rule, the 
affairs of the State are not well administered. Many 
trials are made. Many blunders are committed before 
any given piece of work falls into the hands of com- 
petent men. But mistakes are a source of education. 
Sooner or later the right men will be found, and the 
right management of a public institution will justify 
itself. What is well done can never be wholly undone. 
In the long run, few institutions are less subject to 
partisan influence than a State school. When the foul 
grip of the spoilsman is once unloosed, it can never 
be restored. In the evil days which befell the politics 
of Virginia, when the fair name of the State was 
traded upon by spoilsmen of every party, of every 
degree, the one thing in the State never touched by 
them was the honor of the University of Virginia. 
And amid all the scandal and disorder which followed 
our Civil War, what finger of evil has been laid on 
the Smithsonian Institution or the Military Academy 
at West Point? On that which is intended for no 
venal end, the people will tolerate no venal domina- 
tion. In due time the management of every public 
institution will be abreast of the highest popular opin- 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

ion. Sooner or later the wise man leads ; for his 
ability to lead is at once the test and proof of his 
wisdom. 

Charities under public control result badly, not be- 
cause of the theory, but because of certain relations in 
practice. Their bad effects tend to increase and per- 
petuate themselves, because every organization tends 
to magnify its functions ; and the sole legitimate func- 
tion of public charity is to make public charity unnec- 
essary. State schools are not good at first, because 
under control of unstable forces. They tend to grow 
better and better; for they tend to draw these forces 
into a following. All schools tend to improve, be- 
cause they make their own following. In the same 
way all charities tend to degenerate, because goodness 
in this case consists in being needed just as little as 
possible. Neither schools nor charities are industrial 
investments, and they are not subject to the laws which 
govern enterprises for profit. 

Methods must be judged by their results. Co- 
operation in higher education is always legitimate, 
because those to be educated have not the money which 
great enterprises cost. Co-operation, on the one hand, 
and appreciation, on the other, are necessary to build 
up schools. In similar ways, we must test the best 
method of carrying out any enterprise. Dr. Amos G. 
Warner says that if it were found that better results 
and a better quality of air came from placing the at- 
mosphere in private hands, or using it as a municipal 

67 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

monopoly, he would favor doing so. Matters of this 
kind cannot be settled by theory, but by experiment. 

I need say but a word on the subject of applied 
education. 

Shall the people provide for technical or professional 
training, as well as for general education? My an- 
swer is, Yes; for no other agency will do as well as 
the State the work that should be done. 

Already the General Government has recognized the 
need of industrial training, and has made liberal pro- 
vision for it. Special grants of land and money have 
been made to each State for the purpose of carrying 
on instruction and investigation in the line of me- 
chanics, engineering and agriculture. Each State has 
accepted this trust, and in each the work is being 
carried out with fidelity and with success. 

My conclusions may be summed up in a few words : 

In every demand the people make, the State must 
furnish the means for satisfaction. Whatever schools 
the State may need, the State must create and control. 

If the State fails to furnish the means of education, 
higher or lower these means will never be adequately 
furnished. The people must combine to do this work ; 
for in the long run no other agency can do it. More- 
over, any other means of support, sooner or later, 
forms the entering wedge between the schools and the 
people. 

The first constitution of several of our States con- 
tained the embodiment of educational wisdom, when it 
provided for a general system of education, ascending 

68 



THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE 

in regular gradation, from the township schools to the 
State university — free and equal, open to all, and 
equally open to all forms of religious belief. 

The State of California, following the lead of Michi- 
gan, did wisely when it added to this the provision for 
special training in all lines of technical and profes- 
sional work in which the skill or the wisdom of the 
individual tends toward the advantage of the commu- 
nity or the State. Its next duty in this regard is to 
make this provision adequate, that these professional 
schools may be capable of doing well what they at- 
tempt to accomplish. 



69 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

THE subject of the higher training of young 
women may resolve itself into three ques- 
tions : 

I. Shall a girl receive a college edu- 
cation f 

2. Shall she receive the same kind of college edu- 
cation as a hoy? 

J. Shall she he educated hi the same college? 

As to the first question: It must depend on the 
character of the girl. Precisely so with the boy. What 
we should do with either depends on his or her possi- 
bilities. No parent should let either boy or girl enter 
life with any less preparation than the best he can give. 
It is true that many college graduates, boys and girls 
alike, do not amount to much after the schools have 
done all they can. It is true, also, that higher edu- 
cation is not a question alone of preparing great men 
for great things. It must prepare even little men for 
greater things than they would otherwise have found 
possible. And so it is with the education of women. 
The needs of the time are imperative. The highest 
product of social evolution is the growth of the civil- 
ized home, the home that only a wise, cultivated and 
high-minded woman can make. To furnish such 
women is one of the worthiest functions of higher edu- 
cation. No young women capable of becoming such 
should be condemned to anything lower. Even with 

71 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 



those who are in appearance too dull or too vacil- 
lating to reach any high ideal of wisdom, this may be 
said — it does no harm to try. A few hundred dollars 
is not much to spend on an experiment of such mo- 
ment. Four of the best years of one's life spent in the 
company of noble thoughts and high ideals cannot fail 
to leave their impress. To be wise, and at the same 
time womanly, is to wield a tremendous influence, 
which may be felt for good in the lives of generations 
to come. It is not forms of government by which men 
are made and unmade. It is the character and influ- 
ence of their mothers and their wives. The higher 
education of women means more for the future than 
all conceivable legislative reforms. And its influence 
does not stop with the home. It means higher stand- 
ards of manhood, greater thoroughness of training, 
and the coming of better men. Therefore let us edu- 
cate our girls as well as our boys. A generous edu- 
cation should be the birthright of every daughter of 
the Republic as well as of every son. 

It is hardly necessary among intelligent men and 
women to argue that a good woman is a better one for 
having received a college education. Anything short 
of this is inadequate for the demands of modern life 
and modern culture. The college training should give 
some basis for critical judgment among the various 
lines of thought and effort which force themselves 
upon our attention. Untrained cleverness is said to 
be the most striking characteristic of the American 
woman. Trained cleverness, a very much more 

72 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

charming thing, is characteristic of the American col- 
lege woman. And when cleverness stands in the right 
perspective, when it is so strengthened and organized 
that it becomes wisdom, then it is the most valuable 
dowry a bride can bring to her home. 

Even if the four K's, "Kirche, Kinder, Kuchen and 
Kleider," are to occupy woman's life, as Emperor 
William would have us believe, the college education 
is not too serious a preparation for the profession of 
directing them. A wise son is one who has had a 
wise mother, and to give alertness, intelligence and 
wisdom is the chief function of a college education. 

2. Shall we give our Girls the Same Education as 
our Boys? 

Yes, and no. If we mean by the same, an equal 
degree of breadth and thoroughness, an equal fitness 
for high thinking and wise acting, yes, let it be the 
same. If we mean this: Shall we reach this end by 
exactly the same course of studies? then the answer 
must be. No. For the same course of study will not 
yield the same results with different persons. The 
ordinary "college course" which has been handed down 
from generation to generation is purely conventional. 
It is a result of a series of compromises in trying to 
fit the traditional education of clergymen and gentle- 
men to the needs of a different social era. The old 
college course met the needs of nobody, and therefore 
was adapted to all alike. The great educational awak- 
ening of the last twenty years in America has lain in 
breaking the bonds of this old system. The essence 

73 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

of the new education is constructive individualism. 
Its purpose is to give to each young man that training 
which will make a man of him. Not the training 
which a century or two ago helped to civilize the 
mass of boys of that time, but that which will civilize 
this particular boy. The main reason why the college 
students of today are twenty times as many as twenty 
years ago is that the college training now given is 
valuable to twenty times as many men as could be 
helped by the narrow courses of twenty years ago. 

In the university of today the largest liberty of 
choice in study is given to the student. The pro- 
fessor advises, the student chooses, and the flexibility 
of the courses makes it possible for every form of tal- 
ent to receive proper culture. Because the college of 
today helps ten times as many men as that of yester- 
day could hope to reach, it is ten times as valuable. 
This difference lies in the development of special lines 
of work and in the growth of the elective system. 
The power of choice carries the duty of choosing 
rightly. The ability to choose has made a man out of 
the college boy, and has transferred college work from 
an alternation of tasks and play to its proper relation 
to the business of life. Meanwhile the old ideals have 
not risen in value. If our colleges were to go back 
to the cut-straw of medisevalism, to their work of 
twenty years ago, their professors would speak to 
empty benches. In those colleges which still cling to 
these traditions the benches are empty today, or filled 
with idlers. 

74 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

I do not mean to condemn the study of the ancient 
classics and mathematics which made almost the whole 
of the older college course. These studies must 
always have their place, but no longer an exclusive 
place. The study of the language and literature of 
Greece still ranks with the noblest efforts of the human 
intelligence. For those who can master it, Greek 
gives a help not to be obtained in any other way. As 
Thoreau once observed, those who would speak of 
forgetting the Greek are those who never knew it. 
But without mastery there is no gain of strength. To 
compel all men and boys of whatever character or 
ability to study Greek is in itself a degradation of 
Greek, as it is a hardship to those forced to spend their 
strength where it is not effective. There are other 
forms of culture better fitted to other types of man, and 
the essential feature lies in the strength of mastery. 

The best education for a young woman is surely 
not that which has proved unfit for the young man. 
She is an individual as well as he, and her work gains 
as much as his by relating it to her life. But an insti- 
tution which meets the varied needs of varied men can 
also meet the varied needs of varied women. The 
intellectual needs of the two classes are not very differ- 
ent in many important respects. In so far as these are 
different the elective system gives full play for the ex- 
pression of such differences. It is true that most men 
in college look forward to professional training and 
that very few women do so. But the college training 
is not in itself a part of any profession, and it is broad 

75 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

enough in its range of choice to point to men and 
women alike the way to any profession which may be 
chosen. Those who have to do with the higher edu- 
cation of women know that the severest demands can 
be met by them as well as by men. There is no de- 
mand for easy or "goody-goody" courses of study 
for women except as this demand has been encouraged 
by men. In this matter the supply has always pre- 
ceded the demand. 

There are, of course, certain average differences be- 
tween men and women as students. Women have often 
greater sympathy or greater readiness of memory or 
apprehension, greater fondness for technique. In the 
languages and literature, often in mathematics and 
history, they are found to excel. They lack, on the 
whole, originality. They are not attracted by un- 
solved problems, and in the inductive or "inexact" 
sciences they seldom take the lead. The "motor" 
side of their minds and natures is not strongly de- 
veloped. They do not work for results as much as 
for the pleasure of study. In the traditional courses 
of study ^ — traditional for men — they are often very 
successful. Not that these courses have a fitness for 
women, but that women are more docile and less criti- 
cal as to the purposes of education. And to all these 
statements there are many exceptions. In this, how- 
ever, those who have taught both men and women 
must agree; the training of women is just as serious 
and just as important as the training of men, and no 
training is adequate which falls short of the best. 

1(^ 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

J. Shall Women he Taught in the Same Classes 
as Men? 

This is partly a matter of taste or personal prefer- 
ence. It does no harm whatever to either men or 
women to meet those of the other sex in the same 
classrooms. But if they prefer not to do so, let them 
do otherwise. No harm is done in either case, nor has 
the matter more than secondary importance. Much 
has been said for and against the union in one institu- 
tion of technical schools and schools of liberal arts. 
The technical quality is emphasized by its separation 
from general culture. But I believe that better men 
are made when the two are brought more closely 
together. The culture studies and their students gain 
from the feeling of reality and utility cultivated by 
technical work. The technical students gain from 
association with men and influences of which the 
aggregate tendency is toward greater breadth of sym- 
pathy and a higher point of view. 

A woman's college is more or less distinctly a 
technical school. In most cases, its purpose is dis- 
tinctly stated to be such. It is a school of training 
for the profession of womanhood. It encourages 
womanliness of thought as more or less different from 
the plain thinking which is called manly. The bright- 
est work in woman's colleges is often accompanied by 
a nervous strain, as though its doer were fearful of 
falling short of some outside standard. The best work 
of men is natural, is unconscious, the normal result of 
the contact of the mind with the problem in question. 

77 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

In this direction, I think, lies the strongest argu- 
ment for co-education. This argument is especially 
cogent in institutions in which the individuality of the 
student is recognized and respected. In such schools 
each man, by his relation to action and realities, be- 
comes a teacher of women in these regards, as, in 
other ways, each cultivated woman is a teacher of men. 

In woman's education, as planned for women 
alone, the tendency is toward the study of beauty and 
order. Literature and language take precedence over 
science. Expression is valued more highly than action. 
In carrying this to an extreme the necessary relation 
of thought to action becomes obscured. The scholar- 
ship developed is not effective, because it is not related 
to success. The educated woman is likely to master 
technique, rather than art; method, rather than sub- 
stance. She may know a good deal, but she can do 
nothing. Often her views of life must undergo pain- 
ful changes before she can find her place in the world. 

In schools for men alone, the reverse condition 
often obtains. The sense of reality obscures the ele- 
ments of beauty and fitness. It is of great advantage 
to both men and women to meet on a plane of equality 
in education. Women are brought into contact with 
men who can do things — men in whom the sense of 
reality is strong, and who have definite views of life. 
This influence affects them for good. It turns them 
away from sentimentalism. It gives tone to their 
religious thoughts and impulses. Above all, it tends 
to encourage action as governed by ideals, as opposed 

78 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

to that resting on caprice. It gives them better stand- 
ards of what is possible and impossible when the 
responsibility for action is thrown upon them. 

In like manner, the association with wise, sane and 
healthy women has its value for young men. This 
value has never been fully realized, even by the 
strongest advocates of co-education. It raises their 
ideal of womanhood, and the highest manhood must 
be associated with such an ideal. This fact shows 
itself in many ways; but to point out its existence 
must suffice for the present paper. 

At the present time the demand for the higher 
education of women is met in three different ways : 

1. In separate colleges for women, with courses of 
study more or less parallel with those given in col- 
leges for men. In some of these the teachers are 
all women, in some mostly men, and in others a more 
or less equal division obtains. In nearly all these 
institutions, those old traditions of education and dis- 
cipline are more prevalent than in colleges for men, 
and nearly all retain some trace of religious or denom- 
inational control. In all, the Zeitgeist is producing 
more or less commotion, and the changes in their evo- 
lution are running parallel with those in colleges for 
men. 

2. In annexes for women to colleges for men. In 
these, part of the instruction to the men is repeated for 
the women, though in different classes or rooms, and 
there is more or less opportunity to use the same libra- 
ries and museums. In some other institutions, the 

79 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

relations are closer, the privileges of study being sim- 
ilar, the difference being mainly in the rules of con- 
duct by which the young women are hedged in, the 
young men making their own. 

It seems to me that the annex system cannot be a 
permanent one. The annex student does not get the 
best of the institution, and the best is none too good 
for her. Sooner or later she will demand it, or go 
where the best is to be had. The best students will 
cease to go to the annex. The institution must then 
admit women on equal terms, or not admit them at 
all. There is certainly no educational reason why a 
woman should prefer the annex of one institution 
when another equally good throws its doors wide 
open to her. 

3. The third system is that of co-education. In 
this system young men and young women are ad- 
mitted to the same classes, subjected to the same 
requirements, and governed by the same rules. This 
system is now fully established in the State institutions 
of the North and West, and in most other colleges in 
the same region. Its effectiveness has long since 
passed beyond question among those familiar with its 
operation. Other things being equal, the young men 
are more earnest, better in manners and morals, and in 
all ways more civilized than under monastic conditions. 
The women do more work in a more natural way, with 
better perspective and with saner incentives than when 
isolated from the influence of the society of men. 
There is less of silliness and folly where a man is 

80 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

not a novelty. In co-educational institutions of high 
standards, frivolous conduct or scandals of any form 
are rarely known. The responsibility for decorum is 
thrown from the school to the woman, and the woman 
rises to the responsibility. Many professors have en- 
tered Western colleges with strong prejudices against 
co-education. These prejudices have not often endured 
the test of experience with men who have made an 
honest effort to form just opinions. 

It is not true that the character of the college 
work has been in any way lowered by co-education. 
The reverse is decidedly the case. It is true that un- 
timely zeal of one sort or another has filled the West 
with a host of so-called colleges. It is true that 
most of these are weak and doing poor work in poor 
ways. It is true that most of these are co-educational. 
It is also true that the great majority of their students 
are not of college grade at all. In such schools low 
standards rule, both as to scholarship and as to man- 
ners. The student fresh from the country, with no 
preparatory training, will bring the manners of his 
home. These are not always good manners, as man- 
ners are judged. But none of these defects is derived 
from co-education; nor are any of these conditions 
made worse by it. 

Very lately it is urged against co-education that 
its social demands cause too much strain both on 
young men and young women. College men and 
college women, being mutually attractive, there are 
developed too many receptions, dances and other 

81 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

functions in which they enjoy each other's company. 
But this is a matter easily regulated. Furthermore, 
at the most the average young woman in college 
spends in social matters less than one-tenth the time 
she would spend at home. With the young man the 
whole matter represents the difference between high- 
class and low-class associates and associations. When 
college men stand in normal relation with college 
women, meeting them in society as well as in the 
classroom, there is distinctly less of drunkenness, 
rowdyism and vice than obtains under other condi- 
tions. And no harm comes to the young woman 
through the good influence she exerts. To meet 
freely the best young men she will ever know, the 
wisest, cleanest and strongest, can surely do no harm 
to a young woman. Nor will the association with 
the brightest and sanest young women of the land 
work any harm to the young men. This we must 
always recognize. The best young men and the best 
young women, all things considered, are in our col- 
leges. And this has been and will always be the case. 

It is true that co-education is often attempted 
under very adverse conditions. Conditions are ad- 
verse when the little girls of preparatory schools and 
schools of music are mingled with the college students 
and given the same freedom. This is wrong, what- 
ever the kind of discipline offered, lax or strict; the 
two classes need a different sort of treatment. 

When young women have no residence devoted to 
their use, and are forced to rent parlors and garrets 

82 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

in private houses of an unsympathetic village, evil 
results sometimes arise. Not very often, to be sure, 
but still once in a while. These are not to be charged 
to co-education, but to the unfit conditions that make 
the pursuit of personal culture difficult or impos- 
sible. Women are more readily affected by sur- 
roundings than men are, and squalid, ill-regulated, 
Bohemian conditions should not be part of their higher 
education. 

Another condition very common and very unde- 
sirable is that in which young women live at home 
and traverse a city twice each day on railway or street 
cars to meet their recitations in some college. The 
greatest instrument of culture in a college is the "col- 
lege atmosphere," the personal influence exerted by 
its professors and students. The college atmosphere 
develops feebly in the rush of a great city. The 
"spur-studenten" or railway-track students, as the 
Germans call them, the students who live far from the 
university, get very little of this atmosphere. The 
young woman who attends the university under these 
conditions contributes nothing to the university atmos- 
phere, and therefore receives very little from it. She 
may attend her recitations and pass her examinations, 
but she is in all essential respects "in absentia," and 
so far as the best influences of the university are con- 
cerned, she is neither "co-educated" nor "edu- 
cated." The "spur-student" system is bad enough 
for young men, virtually wasting half their time. 
With young women the condition of continuous rail- 

83 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

reading, attempted study on the trains, the necessary 
frowsiness of railway travel and the laxness of man- 
ners it cultivates, are all elements very undesirable in 
higher education. If young women enter the col- 
leges, they should demand that suitable place be made 
for them. Failing to find this, they should look for it 
somewhere else. Associations which develop vulgarity 
cannot be used for the promotion of culture either for 
men or for women. That the influence of cultured 
women on the whole is opposed to vulgarity is a power- 
ful argument for education, and is the secret basis of 
much of the agitation against it. 

With all this it is necessary for us to recognize 
actual facts. There is no question that a reaction has 
set in against co-education. The number of those 
who proclaim their unquestioning faith is relatively 
fewer than would have been the case ten years ago. 
This change in sentiment is not universal. It will be 
nowhere revolutionary. Young women will not be 
excluded from any institution where they are now 
welcomed, nor will the almost universal rule of co- 
education in State institutions be in any way reversed. 
The reaction shows itself in a little less civility of 
boys toward their sisters and the sisters of other 
boys; in a little more hedging on the part of the pro- 
fessors ; in a little less pointing with pride on the part 
of college executive officials. There is nothing tan- 
gible in all this. Its existence may be denied or 
referred to ignorance or prejudice. 

But such as it is, we may for a moment inquire 

84 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

into its causes. First as to those least worthy. Here 
we may place the dislike of the idle boy to have his 
failures witnessed by women who can do better. I 
have heard of such feelings, but I have no evidence 
that they play much actual part in the question at 
issue. Inferior wom^n do better work than inferior 
men because they are more docile and have much less 
to distract their minds. But there exists a strong 
feeling among rowdyish young men that the prefer- 
ence of women interferes with rowdyish practices. 
This interference is resented by them, and this resent- 
ment shows itself in the use of the offensive term 
"co-ed" and of more offensive words in vogue in 
more rowdyish places. I have not often heard the 
term "co-ed" used by gentlemen, at least without 
quotation marks. Where it is prevalent, it is a sign 
that true co-education — that is, education in terms of 
generous and welcome equality — does not exist. I 
have rarely found opposition to co-education on the 
part of really serious students. The majority are 
strongly in favor of it^, but the minority in this as in 
many other cases make the most noise. The rise 
of a student movement against co-education almost 
always accompanies a general recrudescence of aca- 
demic vulgarity. 

A little more worthy of respect as well as a little 
more potent is the influence of the athletic spirit. In 
athletic matters, the young women give very little 
assistance. They cannot play on the teams, they can- 
not yell, and they are rarely generous with their 

85 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

money in helping those who can. A college of a 
thousand students, half women, counts for no more 
athletically than one of five hundred, all men. It is 
vainly imagined that colleges are ranked by their ath- 
letic prowess, and that every woman admitted keeps 
out a man, and this man a potential punter or sprinter. 
There is not much truth in all of this, and if there 
were, it is of no consequence. College athletics is in 
its essence by-play, most worthy and valuable for 
many reasons, but nevertheless only an adjunct to the 
real work of the college, which is education. If a 
phase of education otherwise desirable interferes with 
athletics, so much the worse for athletics. 

Of like grade is the feeling that men count for 
more than women, because they are more likely to be 
heard from in after-life. Therefore, their education is 
of more importance, and the presence of women 
impedes it. 

A certain adverse influence comes from the fact 
that the oldest and wealthiest of our institutions are 
for men alone or for women alone. These send out a 
body of alumni who know nothing of co-education, 
and who judge it with the positiveness of ignorance. 
Most men filled with the time-honored traditions of 
Harvard and Yale, of which the most permeating is 
that of Harvard's and Yale's infallibility, are against 
co-education on general principles. Similar influences 
in favor of the separate education of women go out 
from the sister institutions of the East. The methods 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

of the experimenting, irreverent, idol-breaking West 
find no favor in their eyes. 

The only serious new argument against co-educa- 
tion is that derived from the fear of the adoption by 
universities of woman's standards of art and science 
rather than those of man, the fear that amateurism 
would take the place of specialization in our higher 
education. Women take up higher education because 
they enjoy it; men because their careers depend upon 
it. Only men, broadly speaking, are capable of ob- 
jective studies. Only men can learn to face fact with- 
out flinching, unswayed by feeling or preference. The 
reality with woman is the way in which the fact affects 
her. Original investigation, creative art, the "reso- 
lute facing of the world as it is" — all belong to man's 
world, not at all to that of the average woman. That 
women in college do as good work as the men is be- 
yond question. In the university they do not, for this 
difference exists, the rare exceptions only proving the 
rule, that women excel in technique, men in actual 
achievement. If instruction through investigation is 
the real work of the real university, then in the real 
university the work of the most gifted women may be 
only by-play. 

It has been feared that the admission of women to 
the university would vitiate the masculinity of its 
standards, that neatness of technique would replace 
boldness of conception, and delicacy of taste replace 
soundness of results. 

It is claimed that the preponderance of high-school- 

87 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

educated women in ordinary society is showing some 
such effects in matters of current opinion. For ex- 
ample, it is claimed that the university extension course 
is no longer of university nature. It is a lyceum 
course designed to please women who enjoy a little 
poetry, play and music, who read the novels of the 
day, dabble in theosophy. Christian science, or physic 
psychology, who cultivate their astral bodies and think 
there is something in palmistry, and are edified by a 
candy-coated ethics of self-realization. There is noth- 
ing ruggedly true, nothing masculine left in it. Cur- 
rent literature and history are affected by the same 
influences. Women pay clever actors to teach them — 
not Shakespeare or Goethe, but how one ought to 
feel on reading King Lear or Faust or Saul. If the 
women of society do not read a book it will scarcely 
"^ciy to publish it. Science is popularized in the same 
fashion by ceasing to be science and becoming mere 
sentiment or pleasing information. This is shown by 
the number of books on how to study a bird, a flower, 
a tree, or a star, through an opera-glass, and without 
knowing anything about it. Such studies may be 
good for the feelings or even for the moral nature, 
but they have no elements of that "fanaticism for 
veracity," which is the highest attribute of the edu- 
cated man. 

These results of the education of many women and 
a few men, by which the half-educated woman be- 
comes a controlling social factor, have been lately set 
in strong light by Dr. Miinsterberg. But they are 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

used by him, not as an argument against co-education, 
but for the purpose of urging the better education of 
more men. They form Hkewise an argument for the 
better education of more women. The remedy for 
feminine dilettantism is found in more severe training. 
Current Hterature as shown in profitable editions re- 
flects the taste of the leisure class. The women with 
leisure who read and discuss vapid books are not repre- 
sentative of woman's higher education. Most of them 
have never been educated at all. In any event this 
gives no argument against co-education. It is thor- 
ough training, not separate training, which is indicated 
as the need of the times. Where this training is taken 
is a secondary matter, though I believe, with the ful- 
ness of certainty that better results can be obtained, 
mental, moral and physical in co-education, than in 
any monastic form of instruction. 

A final question: Does not co-education lead to 
marriage? Most certainly it does; and this fact can- 
not be and need not be denied. The wonder is rather 
that there are not more of such marriages. It is a 
constant surprise that so many college men turn from 
their college associates and marry some earlier or 
later acquaintance of inferior ability, inferior training 
and often inferior personal charm. The marriages 
which result from college association are not often 
premature — college men and college women marry 
later than other men and women — and it is certainly 
true that no better marriages can be made than those 

89 



THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY 

founded on common interests and intellectual friend- 
ships. 

A college man who has known college women, as a 
rule, is not drawn to those of lower ideals and inferior 
training. His choice is likely to be led toward the best 
he has known. A college woman is not led by mere 
propinquinty to accept the attentions of inferior men. 

Where college men have chosen friends in all cases 
both men and women are thoroughly satisfied with the 
outcome of co-education. It is part of the legitimate 
function of higher education to prepare women, as 
well as men, for happy and successful lives. 

An Eastern professor, lately visiting a Western 
state university, asked one of the seniors what he 
thought of the question of co-education. 

"I beg your pardon," said the student, "what ques- 
tion do you mean?" 

"Why, co-education," said the professor, "the edu- 
cation of women in colleges for men." 

"Oh," said the student, "co-education is not a ques- 
tion here." 

And he was right. Co-education is never a question 
where it has been fairly tried. 



90 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY.* 

ALL civilized countries live under a govern- 
ment by popular opinion. In proportion as 
public opinion is wise and enlightened, the 
government will be enlightened and wise. 
In other words, the people will always have as good a 
government as their intelligence and patriotism deserve, 
and no better. In the long run government can be 
made better only by the improvement of the public 
opinion on which it rests. This can be done only by 
the spread of knowledge and the development of the 
moral sense. It is one of the chief duties of the univer- 
sity to send out men who, by their personal influence, 
shall help in the making of good citizens. The manage- 
ment of a great republic in these days is not a simple 
thing. Our nation has within itself a host of evil 
forces, and these forces will destroy it if their influence 
is not met by still more potent forces working together 
for good. We must know these evil influences, their 
origin, their power, and their results, if we are to do 
effective work against them. In this need lies the 
reason for your education. 

The nation and the university have the right to 
expect of you, as educated men and women, to stand 
everywhere as forces on the side of good government. 
Not that you should be good citizens merely ; that you 
should observe the laws, deal justly with your neigh- 

*Address to the Class of 1893, Leland Stanford Jr. University. 

91 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

bors, pay your debts, support your families, and keep 
out of jail. All this we expect of men in general; but 
as you have had opportunities not granted to the major- 
ity, the state has the right to expect more of you. It 
asks not only that you should break none of its laws, 
but that you should help to make and sustain wise laws ; 
that you should stand for good, for right living, right 
thinking, and right acting in the community. It expects 
you to do this, even at a sacrifice of your own personal 
interests. If you should not so stand, your education 
has been a losing bargain. It has simply "sharpened 
your claws and whetted your tusks" that you may the 
more easily prey upon your unenlightened neighbors. 

What then shall the State expect of you more than 
of the others ? Where shall you stand when the count 
is taken in politics, in morals, in religion ? If you are to 
help raise the standard of public opinion, you must 
address yourself to the work in earnest. You must not 
stand aloof from the people it is your duty to help. 
Yet, standing with the masses, you should never lose 
yourself in the mass. You must keep your own com- 
pass and know your own road. The mass will move 
to the left when your instincts and principles tell you 
to go to the right. You may find it a hard struggle, 
and may seem to fail at last; but a force once exerted 
can never be lost. 

It is not your duty to join yourself to organizations 
which can take away any part of your freedom. It is 
not your duty to vote the ticket of my party, nor of 
your party, nor that of any one of the time-honored 

92 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

political organizations into which men naturally fall. 
For you and I know that the questions which divide the 
great parties of a free country are not, as a rule, ques- 
tions of morals or good citizenship. The sheep are 
never all on one side, nor the goats on the other. Party 
divisions are based, for the most part, on hereditary 
tendencies, on present expediencies, and hopes of tem- 
porary gain, and too often on the distribution of power 
and plunder, of power to plunder. When your party is 
led by bad men, or when its course is headed in the 
wrong direction, your State expects you as educated 
men to know it. 

Your State expects you to have the courage of your 
convictions. Your State expects you to have the power 
to stand alone — to bolt, if need be, when other modes of 
protest fail. You will not win friends by asserting 
your manhood against partisan pressure. You will not 
pave the way to a vote of thanks or a nomination to 
Congress, but you will keep your own self-respect, and 
some day, when the party recovers its senses, you will 
see it come in full run in your direction. 

One duty of the scholar in politics is to serve as an 
antidote to the thick-and-thin partisan — the rock-ribbed 
Bourbon of any party, who learns nothing, and scruples 
at nothing. A good citizen, as has been well said, can- 
not vote an unscratched ticket. The man who does so, 
in whatever party, leaves in the course of years few 
sorts of rascals, public or private, unsupported by his 
vote. The men whom your vote helps to elect are prop- 
erly regarded as your representatives, and the knave, 

93 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

the trickster, the gambler, the drunkard, the briber, the 
boss, should not rightfully represent you. If such do 
represent you, it would be better for our country if you 
were left unrepresented, and the State has made a 
losing bargain in educating you. 

I do not plead for political isolation. That you stand 
aloof from the majority, is no proof that you are right 
and they are wrong. For the most part, we believe, the 
feeling of the majority is not far from right. The great 
heart of the republic beats true. To doubt this would 
be to despair of popular government. But whether 
right or wrong, the majority of the party are not the 
keepers of your conscience. Your conscience is your 
own. 'T went into this convention," said a brave man 
once, "a free man, with my own head under my own 
hat, and a free man I meant to come out of it." The 
opinions of the majority are molded by the few. That 
among these few who would mold opinion you should 
stand, is a reason for your training in the science of 
government. In all questions of public or private 
policy, be yourself, no matter who your grandfather 
was, no matter who your neighbor may be. If you are 
born and bred in any party, think of these things. A 
heredity yoke is ignoble; shake it off, and then, when 
once a free man, you may resume your place, if you 
choose. If there must be a heredity partisanship in 
your family, be you the man to start it. Be the first 
in your dynasty, and encourage your son to be the 
first in his. 

But your State expects more of you than mere inde- 

94 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

pendence of heredity prejudices. Let it never be said 
of you : "It is for his interest to do so and so ; there- 
fore we can count on him. He Hves in the First Ward ; 
therefore he believes in prohibition. He lives in the 
Sixth Ward; therefore his vote is for free whisky. 
He will make by this thing; therefore he favors that 
course of action." It is much easier to be independent 
of political bosses than to be free from the dictation of 
your own selfish instincts. But the good citizen is 
superior to the prejudices of his locality, to the selfish 
interests of his trade. The good man is a citizen of 
the State, not of the Sixth Ward — not of the iron 
county, nor of the raisin county, nor of the State 
merely, nor of the United States. The good citizen is 
a citizen of the world; itself, as citizenship improves, 
becoming one vast community, the greatest of all repub- 
lics. For true patriotism is not a matter of waving 
flags and Fourth of July orations. It lies not in de- 
nouncing England nor in fighting Chile; not in cock- 
crowing nor in bull-baiting. It consists in first know- 
ing what is true about one's own community or coun- 
try, and then in the willingness to sink one's personal 
interest in the welfare of the whole. All patriotism 
which involves neither knowledge nor self-devotion is 
a worthless counterfeit. 

We have the right to expect the scholar to serve as 
an antidote to the demagogue. You have been trained 
to recognize the fetiches and bugaboos of the past; 
you should know those of the present. Notions as 
wild, if not as wicked, as the witchcraft that haunted 

93 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

Salem two hundred years ago still vex our American 
life. The study of history is your defense against 
these. As "the running stream, they dare na' cross," 
kept off the witches of old, so will your studies in this 
field defend you from bugaboos, alive or dead. You 
hold the magic wand before which the demagogue is 
silent and harmless. It is your duty and privilege to 
use it for the people's good. 

It is true that America is not the best governed of 
the civilized nations. You know that this is so. You 
know that America's foreign policy is weak, vacillating, 
inefficient. You know that her internal policy is lavish, 
careless, unjust. You know that we no longer send, as 
in the old days, "our wisest men to make the public 
laws." You know that our legislative bodies, from the 
board of Aldermen to the United States Senate, are not 
always bodies of which we are proud. You know that 
their members often are not men in whom the people 
have confidence. Our civil service has been one of the 
worst "on the planet ;" our foreign service has been the 
laughing stock of Europe. Our courts of justice, on the 
whole the soundest part of our government, are not 
all that they should be. Too often they are neither 
swift nor sure. Too often the blindfold goddess who 
rules over them is quick to discern the pressure of the 
finger of gold on the "wrong side of the balances." 
Our currency fluctuates for the benefit of the gambler, 
who thrives at the laborers' cost. In all this our own 
California offers no exception. The history of her gov- 
ernment is a short one, but it is long with the records 

96 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

of misrule and corruption. Her average of general 
intelligence is high. Her average of special knowledge 
is low, and equally low is her standard of patriotism. 

All these things we know, and worse, and they vex 
us and discourage us, and some there are among us 
who wish that we had a heaven-descended aristocracy, 
an aristocracy of brains at least, who could take these 
things out of the people's hands, out of your hands and 
mine, and make them and keep them right. I do not 
feel thus. It is better that the people should suffer, with 
the remedy in their own hands, than that they should be 
protected by som.e power not of themselves. Badly 
though the people may manage their own affairs, the 
growth of the race depends upon their doing it. We 
would rather the people would rule ill through choice 
than that they should be ruled well through force. 
The Reign of Terror gives more hope for the future 
than the reign of the good King Henry. The story of 
the decline and fall of empires is the story of the 
growth of man. 

It is not that the laws of England should be made 
better that Gladstone took into partnership, as law- 
makers, two millions of England's farmers and work- 
men who can barely read or write. The laws for a 
time, at least, will not be as good, but those for whom 
the laws are made will be better, and the good of the 
people is the object of law. It is not our confidence in 
Irish wisdom and prudence that leads every American 
to approve of Home Rule in Ireland. It is our sym- 
pathy with Irish manhood and our belief that Irish 

97 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 



manhood can manage its own affairs. It is not that our 
Southern States should be better governed that three 
millions of freedmen, little more intelligent in the mass 
than the dog or horse with which a few years before 
they had been bought and sold, were given the right 
to vote. No better for the State, perhaps ; for an igno- 
rant vote is a cowardly vote, and a vote which money 
will buy. No better for the State, but better for 
humanity, that her laws should recognize the image of 
God hidden in each dusky skin. For lawlessness, 
turbulence, misgovernment is better than prosperity 
with its heel on the neck of a silent race which cannot 
rise nor speak. 

But all government by the people is made better 
when the people come to know and feel its deficiencies. 
No abuse can survive long when the people have located 
it. When the masses know what hurts them, that 
particular wrong must cease. Its life depends upon 
its appearing in the disguise of a public blessing. 
Straight thinking, as you have learned, comes before 
straight acting, and both we expect of you. To you, 
as educated men and women, the people have a right 
to look. They have a right to expect your influence 
in the direction of the ideal government, the republic 
in which government by the people shall be good gov- 
ernment as well ; the government from which no man 
nor woman shall be excluded, and in which no man nor 
woman shall be ignorant, or venal, or corrupt. 

The influence of the university life is in the direction 
of high ideals. The trained mind is the best keeper of 

98 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

the clear conscience. It is the duty of the university to 
fill the student's mind with high notions of how his 
personal, social, and political life ought to be conducted 
and to lead him toward discontent with that which is 
on a lower plane. You have all heard it said that cer- 
tain reforms in American life are advocated only by 
college professors and by boys just out of college. It 
is said that these notions of college boys would be 
admirable in Utopia, but are ridiculous in nineteenth- 
century America. We are told that self-seeking and 
corruption are essential elements in our American life. 
That in our political and social battles we must not be 
squeamish, but must fight our adversaries as devils 
are said to fight each other — with fire. Of course, this 
charge of Utopianism is in the main true, and I trust 
that it may remain so. The Utopian element is one 
which our life sorely needs. We have fought the devil 
with fire long enough. Too long have we attempted 
good results by evil means. Too long has the right 
been grandly victorious through bribery, falsehood, and 
fraud, till we are more afraid of the bad means of our 
friends than the bad ends of our adversaries. 

What though all reform seems Utopian, — does that 
absolve you? Unless your soul dwells in Utopia, life 
is not worth the keeping. Your windows should look 
toward heaven, not into the gutter. You should stand 
above the level of the world's baseness and filth. If our 
scholars do not so stand — if our training end in the 
production merely of sharper manipulators than those 
we had before (and we know there is an undercurrent 

: e-. 99 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

in our college life tending just in that direction), then 
the sooner we bar our windows and don our striped 
uniforms, the better for the country. 

But we need not take this dark view of the future. 
We know that, on the whole, training makes for virtue. 
There is a natural connection between "Sweetness and 
Light." We know that whatever leads the youth to 
look beyond the narrow circle in which he stands, is 
his best safeguard against temptation. We know that 
if the youth fall not, the man will stand. I shall not 
argue this question. I assume it as a fact of experi- 
ence, and it is this fact which gives our public-school 
system, of which my life and yours is in some degree 
a product, the right to exist. "A dollar in a university," 
says Emerson, "is worth more than a dollar in a jail. If 
you take out of this town the ten honestest merchants, 
and put in ten rogues, with the same amount of capital, 
the rates of insurance will soon indicate it, the sound- 
ness of the banks will show it, the highways will be less 
secure, the schools will feel it, the children will bring 
home their little dose of poison, the judge will sit less 
firmly on his bench, and his decisions will be less up- 
right; he has lost so much support and constraint, 
which we all need, and the pulpit will betray it in a 
laxer rule of life." If taking from the community ten 
good men and replacing them with bad men work this 
evil, what will come from doing the reverse? If we 
add ten good men — one good man — to any community, 
the banks, the courts, the churches, the schools will 
feel it as an impulse toward better things. 

100 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

The statesmanship of every nation has regarded the 
development of higher education as a plain duty to 
itself. The great universities of the world have arisen, 
not from the overflow of riches, but from the nation's 
need of men. The University of Leyden was founded 
in the darkest days of Holland's history as the strongest 
barrier Holland could raise against Spanish oppres- 
sion — as the most effective weapon she could place in 
the hands of William the Silent. 

For the State — that is, every man in the State — is 
helped and strengthened by all that makes its members 
wiser, better, or more enlightened. That you are edu- 
cated, if educated aright, tends to raise the price of 
every foot of land around you. When Emerson, and 
Hawthorne, and Thoreau lived in Concord, this fact 
was felt in the price of every city lot in Concord. Men 
from other towns were willing to pay money in order 
to live near them. When a smart lawyer, a few years 
ago, was elected governor of Massachusetts, there 
were men who left that State rather than that he should 
be their governor. You and I are not so sensitive, 
perhaps; but however that may be, the election of a 
bad man as governor will be felt in the falling price 
of land and houses, in the falling price of honesty and 
truth in the markets of the nation. 

As in political, so in social life, should the student 
stand as a barrier against materialism. Not alone 
against the elaborate materialism of the erudite phil- 
osopher. Its virus, dry and dusty, attenuated by its 
transfer from Germany, can rarely do much harm. 

101 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

But there is a subtler materialism which pervades our 
whole life: It sits in the cushioned pews of our 
churches, as well as in our marts of trade. It preaches 
the gospel of creature comforts and the starvation of 
the spirit. It preaches the gospel of selfhood, instead 
of the law of love. It asks of all the scholar should 
hold dear, — of truth, and beauty, and goodness, and 
sweetness, and light, — what are these things worth? 
If they will bring no money in this world, nor save our 
souls in the next, we want nothing of them. Wherever 
you go after you leave the college halls you will feel 
the chill of this materialism. You must keep your 
sympathies warm, and your soul open to all good 
influences, to keep it away. 

There is, too, a sort of skepticism about us against 
which the scholar should be proof. Once the skeptic 
was the man simply who had his eyes open; the man 
who questioned nature and life, and from such ques- 
tioning has all of our knowledge come. But question- 
ing with eyes open is not the same as doubting with 
eyes closed. There is a doubting which saps the foun- 
dation of all growth, which cuts the nerve of all prog- 
ress. It is the question of Pilate, who doubted — "What 
is truth?" Whether, indeed, any truth exists? And 
whether, after all, being is other than seeming? 

Every robust human life is a life of faith. Not faith 
in what other men have said and thought about life, or 
death, or fate ; but faith that there is something in the 
universe that transcends man and all man's conceptions 
of right and wrong, and which it is well to know. 

102 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 



Some forty years ago a president of the University 
of Indiana is reported to have said: "The people 
insist on being humbugged; so it is our duty to hum- 
bug them." Great is the power of Humbug, and many 
and mighty are his prophets! Do you never beHeve 
this. A pin-prick in the ribs will kill the charlatan, but 
the man who is genuine throughout is clad in triple 
armor. To him and to his teachings will the people 
turn long after the power of humbug is forgotten. 
The studies you have followed as a scholar should teach 
you to know and value truth. You have found some 
things which you should know as true, judged by any 
tests the world can offer. 

In his relations with others, the scholar must be 
tolerant. Culture comes from contact with many 
minds. To the uncultured mind, things unfamiliar 
seem uncouth, outlandish, abhorrent. A wider ac- 
quaintance with the affairs of our neighbor gives us 
more respect for his ideas and ways. He may be 
wrong-headed and perverse ; but there is surely some- 
thing we can learn from him. So with other nations 
and races. Each can teach us something. In civilized 
lands the foreigner is no longer an outcast, and object 
of fear or abhorrence. The degree of tolerence which 
is shown by any people toward those whose opinions 
differ from their own is one of the best tests of civiliza- 
tion. It is a recognition of individuality and the rights 
of the individual in themselves and in others. 

I need not dwell on this. The growth of tolerance 
is one of the most important phases in the history of 

103 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

modern civilization. The right of freedom of the 
mind, the right of private interpretation, is a birth- 
right of humanity. As the scholar has taken a noble 
part in the struggle which has won for us this freedom, 
so should he guard it in the future as one of his highest 
possessions. It is each man's right to hew his own 
pathway toward the truth. If there be in this country 
a town, North, South, East, West, on the banks of the 
Yazoo, or the Hudson, or the Sacramento, where an 
honest man cannot speak his honest mind without risk 
of violence or of social ostracism, in that town our 
freedom is but slavery still, and our civilization but a 
barbarism thinly disguised. 

The man who speaks may be a sage or a fool; he 
may be wise as a serpent, or harmless as a calf; he 
may please us or not ; yet, whatever he be, his freedom 
of speech is his American birthright. To words, if 
you like, you can answer with words. The whole 
atmosphere is yours, from which to frame your replies. 
If you are right, and he is wrong, so much the stronger 
will your answer be. But the club, the brick, the shot- 
gun, or the dynamite bomb are not the answer of the 
free man or the brave. They convince nobody ; and of 
all oppressive laws, the law which is taken in the hands 
of the mob is the most despotic and most dangerous. 

The scholar should never allow himself to become a 
mere iconoclast. He has no strength to waste in con- 
troversy. Truth is non-resistant because its enemies 
cannot last. There is not much to be gained from 

104 



^.£3^ 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 



tearing down. Build something better, and the old 
will disappear of itself. 

When a righteous man attempts to reform society by 
attacking an unrighteous man, the public forms a ring 
around the two, to see that there is fair play, and that 
truth and falsehood are given alike a fair show. Soon 
the public ceases to be interested in the question of who 
is right, and becomes interested in who is the best 
fellow. 

The people have the right to expect of the scholar 
growth. One of the saddest products of the college is 
that which in science is called "arrested development." 
When the student is transplanted from the hotbed of 
the college to the cold soil of the world, his growth 
sometimes ceases, to the disappointment of his friends 
and the dismay of those who have faith in higher edu- 
cation. Without that perseverance which thrives 
under adversity, your attainments in college will avail 
you little. 

You have reached one port in the journey of life; 
and of this achievement you have the right to be 
proud. But the first port is not the end of the voyage. 
The great ocean is still beyond you, and the value of 
the voyage in the long run is proportionate to the 
distance of the port for which you are bound. It takes 
a longer preparation and a larger equipment for a 
voyage to the Cape of Good Hope than for a sail to 
the 'Tsle of Dogs." 

The value of a Hfe is measured by its aim rather 
than by its achievement. Loftiness of aim is essential 

105 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

to loftiness of spirit. Nothing that is really high can 
be reached in a short time nor by any easy route. Most 
men, as men go, aim at low things, and they reach the 
object of their ambitions. They have only to move in 
straight lines to an end clearly visible. Not so with 
you. You are bound on a quest beyond the limit of 
your vision. There are mountains to climb, rivers to 
ford, deserts to cross on your search for the Holy 
Grail. The end is never in sight. You have always 
to trust and struggle on, parting company at every 
step with those who have chosen more accessible goals 
or are diverted from the great quest by chance attrac- 
tions. "Heaven is not reached by a single bound," 
nor by him who knows not whither he is going. 

That your aims in life are high, that you are pledged 
to a life of effort and growth, is shown by your pres- 
ence here. Were it not so, you would never have 
pressed thus far onward. You would be with the 
hundreds and thousands of your contemporaries who 
are satisfied with inferior aims reached in an inferior 
way. 

We all recognize this fact, even though we may not 
have put the thought into words. The banks recognize 
it. Without a dollar in your pocket, you can borrow 
money on the strength of your purpose. Many of you 
have already done this. You may have to do it again. 
It is right that you should. Strength of purpose is a 
legitimate capital. By your own desires and aspirations 
you are enriched. In a free country there can be but 
one poor man — the man without a purpose. 

106 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

What you have done thus far is Httle in itself. You 
have reached but the threshold of learning. Your 
education is barely begun, and there is no one but you 
who can finish it. Your thoughts are but as the 
thoughts of children, your writings but trash from the 
world's wastepaper basket. Nothing that you know, 
or think, or do but has been better known or thought 
or done by others. The work of your lives is barely 
begun. You must continue to grow as you are now 
growing before you can serve the world in any im- 
portant way. But the promise of the future is with 
you. You have the power and will of growth. The 
sunshine and rain of the next century will fall upon 
you. You will be stimulated by its breezes, you will be 
inspired by its spirit. 

It is not an easy thing to grow. Decay and decline 
is easier than growth — so the trees will tell you. 
Growth is slow, and hard, and wearisome. The lob- 
ster suffers the pangs of death every time he outgrows 
and sheds his shell; but each succeeding coat of 
armor is thicker, and stronger, and more roomy. So 
with you. You will find it easier not to develop. It 
will be pleasanter to adjust yourself to old circum- 
stances and to let the moss grow on your back. The 
struggle for existence is hard; the struggle for im- 
provement is harder; and some there are among you 
who sooner or later will cease struggling. Such will 
be the cases of arrested development — ^those who prom- 
ised much and did little, those whose education did 
not bring effectiveness. Be never satisfied with what 

107 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

you have accomplished, the deeds you can do, the 
thoughts you can think. Such satisfaction is the sting 
of old age, the feeling that the best is behind us, and 
that the noble quest is over forever. 

The scholar shall be a man of honor, one whom men 
may trust. Once a king wrote to his queen, after a 
disastrous battle: "Madam, all is lost — all but our 
honor." When honor is saved a battle can never be 
lost. But in many of the battles and sham fights of the 
world — in most of those, perhaps, in which you will be 
called to take part, — the honor on one side or the other 
is the first thing to be lost. Some men, in entering 
public life, lay aside their consciences as Cortez burned 
his ships, that they may not be tempted to retreat 
toward honor and decency. People say, as you have 
heard, that the sense of honor in our republic is wan- 
ing ; that sentiment in politics or business is a thing of 
the past. Certainly, from Franklin, and Hamilton, and 
Knox, and Jay to some public servants we have seen, 
the fall has been great, and the descent to Avernus 
seems easy. We hear sometimes of men who possess 
the old-fashioned ideas of honor, and we associate 
these men with the knee-breeches, and wigs, and ruf- 
fles of the same old-fashioned times. The moral law 
is growing flexible with use, and parts of it, like the 
Blue Laws of Connecticut, are already out of date. 
See to it that it is not so with you. In any contest fair 
play is better than victory. The essence of success is 
fair play. 

As honest men and women, you will often find your- 

108 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 



selves in opposition to those who regard themselves as 
leaders of reform.* A cause founded on sentiment, 
even though it be righteous sentiment, cannot succeed 
all at once, and never unless controlled by wisdom. 
Political expediency may be a wiser guide than feeling 
alone. There is some truth in the paradox that senti- 
mentality in politics is more dangerous than venality, 
and that the venal man is our safeguard against the 
idealist and enthusiast. Venality, with all its evils, is 
conservative, hence opposed to ill-considered action. 
''Laissez-faire" is now a discredited principle. It is no 
longer possible to let things take their course when so 
many men try to find out what is right, and use every 
effort to bring it about. But we must remember that 
men can do only what is possible. All unscientific or 
sentimental tinkering with society, and law, and gov- 
ernment is still ''laissez-faire." The blind effort to do 
the impossible effects nothing. It is only the whirl of 
the water in the eddy of the stream, which in no way 
hastens or changes its flow. Man must first learn the 
direction of the currents. The efforts he puts forth 

*Professor H. H. Powers has said: "A knowledge of the magnitude 
and complexity of the causes of social phenomena tends to disparage 
panaceas and all hasty efforts for social improvement. However much 
we may believe in the control of social evolution by reason and human 
effort, a study of society cannot but convince us that changes must 
be slow to be either wholesome or permanent, and that effort spent on 
merely proximate causes is ineffectual. These conclusions are not agree- 
able to those who organize crusades. It is one of the painful incidents 
of science that the student is so often called upon to part company 
with the reformer. The fervid appeals and enthusiastic championship 
by which he seeks to enlist men into a grand reforming mob grate 
harshly on the ears of one who sees the difficulties of bettering society, 
while the other sees only its desirability. After a few vain attempts 
to inoculate a little science into these reformers while they are charging 
at double-quick, the student is apt to give up the attempt and to seem 
henceforth unfriendly to reform." 

109 



THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY 

must be in harmony with these currents, else his labors 
may hinder, and not help, real progress. The opposite 
of laissez-faire is not action simply, but action based 
on knowledge. 

To be known as an apostle or as the devotee of some 
special idea, often prevents a man from learning or 
from growing. The apostle fears to confuse his mind 
with the results of the study of social forces. The 
scholar cannot ignore these forces, and must be pre- 
pared to reckon with each one, but this does not justify 
indifference or obstruction. Wisdom and sobriety arise 
from the efforts of wise and sober men. Wise and 
sober you should be, if you are rightly educated. 

Not all of you will leave your names as a legacy to 
your country's history. The alumni roll of your Alma 
Mater may be at last the only list that remembers you ; 
but if you have been a center of right living and right 
thinking, if the character of your neighbors is the 
better for your having lived, your life mission will have 
been fulfilled. No man or woman can do more than 
that. "True piety," as you have heard to-day, "con- 
sists in reverence for the gods and help to man.* 
Therefore help men. Seek that spiritual utilitarianism 
whose creed is social perfection, and foster that intel- 
ligent patriotism which chastens because it loves." 

*Professor George Elliott Howard. 



110 



THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN* 

THE best political economy," Emerson tells 
us, "is the care and culture of men." Cul- 
ture is not coddling, but training,— not help 
from without, but growth from within. The 
harsh experience of centuries has shown that men are 
not made by easy processes. Character is a hardy 
plant. It thrives best where the north wind tempers 
the sunshine. 

The life of civilized man is no simple art,— no auto- 
matic process. To make life easy is to destroy its 
effectiveness. The civilization to which we are born 
makes heavy demands upon those who take part in it. 
Its rights are all duties; its privileges are all responsi- 
bilities. Its risks are terrible to those who do not make 
their responsibilities good. And these responsibilities 
are not individual alone. They fall upon all who are 
bound together in social or industrial alliance. If we 
are to bear one another's burdens, we must see that 
we lay upon ourselves no unnecessary burdens by our 
indifference or our ignorance. There is no safety for 
the republic, no safety for the individual man, for 
whom the republic exists, so long as he or his fellows 
are untrained or not trained aright. 

So there is no virtue in educational systems unless 
these systems meet the needs of the individual. It is 
not the ideal man or the average man who is to be 
tramed; it is the particular man as the forces of 

111 



THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN 

heredity have made him. His own quaUties determine 
his needs. "A child is better unborn than untaught." 
A child, however educated, is still untaught if by his 
teaching we have not emphasized his individual char- 
acter, if we have not strengthened his will and its 
guide and guardian, the mind. 

The essence of manhood lies in the growth of the 
power of choice. In the varied relations of life the 
power to choose means the duty of choosing right. 
To choose the right, one must have the wit to know it 
and the will to demand it. In the long run, in small 
things as in large, wrong choice leads to death. It is 
not "punished by death," for nature knows nothing of 
rewards and punishments. Death is simply its inevi- 
table result. No republic can live — no man can live in 
a republic in which wrong is the repeated choice either 
of the people or of the State. 

All education must be individual — fitted to individual 
needs. That which is not so is unworthy of the name. 
A misfit education is no education at all. Every man 
that lives has a right to some form of higher educa- 
tion. For there is no man that would not be made bet- 
ter and stronger by continuous training. I do not 
mean, of course, that the conventional college educa- 
tion of to-day could be taken by every man to his 
advantage. Still less could the average man use the 
conventional college education of any past era. Higher 
education has seemed to be the need of the few because 
it has been so narrow. It was born in the days of 
feudal caste. It was made for the few. Its type was 

112 



THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN 



fixed and pre-arranged, and those whose minds it did 
not fit were looked upon by the colleges as educational 
outcasts. The rewards of investigation, the pleasures 
of high thinking, the charms of harmony were not for 
the multitude. To the multitude they must be accessi- 
ble in the future; but not as gifts — nothing worth 
having was ever a gift — rather as rights to be taken by 
those who can hold them. 

To furnish the higher education that humanity needs, 
the college must be broad as humanity. No spark of 
talent man may possess should be outside its fostering 
care. To fit men into schemes of education has been 
the mistake of the past. To fit education to man is the 
work of the future. 

The traditions of higher education in America had 
their origin in social conditions very different from 
ours. In the Golden Age of Greece, each free man 
stood on the back of nine slaves. The freedom of the 
ten was the birthright of the one. To train the tenth 
man was the function of the early university. Only 
free men can be trained. A part of this training of the 
tenth in the early days was necessary in the arts by 
which the nine were kept in subjection. 

The universities of Paris, and Oxford, and Cam- 
bridge were founded to educate the lord and the priest. 
And to these schools and their successors, as time went 
on, fell the duty of training the gentleman and the 
clergyman. Only in our day has it been recognized 
that the common man had part or lot in higher educa- 
tion. For now he has come into his own, and he 

113 



THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN 

demands that he, too, may be noble and gentle. His 
own lord and king is the common man already, and 
in the next century we shall see him installed as his 
own priest. And through higher education he must 
gain fitness for his work, if he gain it at all. And he 
must gain it; for the future of civilization is in his 
hands. The world cannot afford to let him fail. All 
the ages have looked forward to the common man as 
their 'heir apparent.' The whole past of humanity is 
staked on his success. 

The old traditions are not sufficient for him. The 
narrow processes by which gentlemen were trained in 
medieval Oxford are not adequate to the varied de- 
mands of the man of the twentieth century. He is 
more than a gentleman. Heir to all the ages he must 
be; and there are ages since, as there were ages 
before, the tasks set in these schools became stereotyped 
as culture. The need of choice has become a thousand- 
fold greater with the extension of human knowledge 
and human power. The need of choosing right is 
steadily growing more and more imperative. If the 
common man is to be his own lord and his own priest 
in these strenuous days, his strength must be as great, 
his consecration as intense as it was with those who 
were his rulers in ruder and less trying times. The 
osmosis of classes is still going on. By its silent force 
it has ''pulled down the mighty from their seats, and 
has exalted them of low degree." Again educate our 
rulers. We find that they need it. They have, in the 
aggregate, not yet the brains, nor the conscience, nor 

114 



THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN 



the force of will that fits them for the task the fates 
have thrown upon them. 

If the civilization of the one is shared by the ten, it 
must increase tenfold in amount. If it does not, the 
Golden Age it seems to represent must pass away. To 
hold the civilization we enjoy today is the work of 
higher education. Every moment we feel it slipping 
from our hands. Hence, every moment we must strive 
for a fresh hold. "Eternal vigilance," it was said of 
old, "is the price of liberty." And this was what was 
meant. The perpetuation of free institutions rests 
with free men. The masses, the mobs of men, are 
never free. Hence the need of the hour is to break 
up the masses. They should be masses no longer, but 
individual men and women. The work of higher 
education is to put an end to the rule of the multitude. 
To tyranny confusion is succeeding, and the remedy 
for confusion is in the growth of men who cannot be 
confused. 

The university of today must recognize the need 
of the individual student as the reason for its existence. 
If we are to make men and women out of boys and 
girls, it will be as individuals, not as classes. The best 
field of corn is that in which the individual stalks are 
most strong and most fruitful. Class legislation has 
always proved pernicious and ineffective, whether in 
a university or in a state. The strongest nation is that 
in which the individual man is most helpful and 
most independent. The best school is that which exists 
for the individual student. A university is not an 

115 



■JirvjrMj;;-5esx,;: ■■ 



m 



THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN 

aggregation of colleges, departments, or classes. It is 
built up of young men and women. The student is its 
unit. The basal idea of higher education is that each 
student should devote his time and strength to what is 
best for him; that no force of tradition, no rule of 
restraint, no bait of a degree should swerve any one 
from his own best educational path. As Melville Best 
Anderson has said, "The way to educate a man is to 
set him at work; the way to get him to work is to 
interest him, the way to interest him is to vitalize his 
task by relating it to some form of reality." No man 
was ever well trained whose own soul was not wrought 
into the process. No student was ever brought to any 
worthy work except by his own consent. 

So the university must not drive, but lead. Nor, 
in the long run, should it even lead; for the training 
of the will is effected by the exercise of self-guidance. 
The problem of human development is to bring men 
into the right path by their own realization that it is 
good to walk therein. The student must feel with 
every day's work that it has some place in the forma- 
tion of his character. His character he must form for 
himself; but higher education gives him the materials. 
His character gathers consecration as the work goes 
on, if he can see for himself the place of each element 
in his training. Its value he has tested, and he knows 
that it is good, and its results he learns to treasure 
accordingly. 

Individualism in education is no discovery of our 
times. It was by no means invented at Palo Alto; 

116 



iSi 



THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN 



neither was it born in Harvard nor in Michigan. The 
need of it is written in the heart of man. It has found 
recognition wherever the "care and culture" of man 
has been taken seriously. 

A Japanese writer, Uchimura, says this of education 
in old Japan: "We were not taught in classes then. 
The grouping of soul-bearing human beings into 
classes, as sheep upon Australian farms, was not known 
in our old schools. Our teachers believed, I think in- 
stinctively, that man (persona) is unclassifiable ; that 
he must be dealt with personally — i. e. face to face, and 
soul to soul. So they schooled us one by one — each 
according to his idiosyncracies, physical, mental, and 
spiritual. They knew each one of us by his name. 
And as asses were never harnessed with horses, there 
was little danger of the latter being beaten down into 
stupidity, or the former driven into valedictorians' 
graves. In this respect, therefore, our old-time teach- 
ers in Japan agreed with Socrates and Plato in their 
theory of education. So naturally the relation between 
teachers and students was the closest one possible. We 
never called our teachers by that unapproachable name, 
Professor. We called them Sensei, men born before, 
so named because of their prior birth, not only in 
respect of the time of their appearance in this world, 
which was not always the case, but also of their coming 
to the understanding of the truth. It was this, our idea 
of relationship between teacher and student, which 
made some of us to comprehend at once the intimate 
relation between the Master and the disciples which 

117 



THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN 

we found in the Christian Bible. When we found 
written therein that the disciple is not above his mas- 
ter, nor the servant above his lord; or that the good 
shepherd giveth his life for his sheep, and other similar 
sayings, we took them almost instinctively as things 
known to us long before." 

Thus it was in old Japan. Thus should it be in new 
America. In such manner do the oldest ideas forever 
renew their youth, when these ideas are based not on 
tradition or convention, but in the nature of man. 

The best care and culture of man is not that which 
restrains his weakness, but that which gives play to 
his strength. We should work for the positive side of 
life. We should build up ideals of effort. To get rid 
of vice and folly is to let strength grow in their place. 

The great danger in democracy is the seeming pre- 
dominance of the weak. The strong and the true seem 
to be never in the majority. The politician who knows 
the signs of the times understands the ways of majori- 
ties. He knows fully the weakness of the common 
man. Injustice, violence, fraud, and corruption are 
all expressions of this weakness. These do not spring 
from competition, but from futile efforts to stifle com- 
petition. Competition means fair play. Unfair play 
is the confession of weakness. 

The strength of the common man our leaders do not 
know. Ignorant, venal, and vacillating the common 
man is at his worst; but he is also earnest, intelligent, 
and determined. To know him at his best is the essence 
of statesmanship. His power for good may be used as 

118 



THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN 

well as his power for evil. It was this trust of the 
common man that made the statesmanship of Abraham 
Lincoln. And under such a leader the common man 
ceased to be common. To know strength is the secret 
of power. To work with the best in human nature is 
to have the fates on your side. 

"A flaw in a thought an inch long," says a Chinese 
poet, "leaves a trace of a thousand miles." If collect- 
ive action is to be safe, the best thought of the best men 
must control it. It is the ideal of statesmanship to 
bring these best thoughts into unison. The flaw in 
the thought of each one will be corrected by the clear 
vision of others. And this order and freedom, clear 
vision and clean acting, we have the right to expect 
from you. Knowledge is power, because thought is 
convertible into action. Ignorance is weakness, be- 
cause without clearness of purpose action can never 
be effective. 

The best political economy is the care and culture of 
men. The best-spent money of the present is that 
which is used for the future. The force which is used 
on the present is spent or wasted. That which is used 
on the future is repaid with compound interest. It is 
for you to show that effort for the future, of which you 
are the subjects, is not wasted effort. That you will do 
so we have no shadow of doubt. If its influence on you 
and you only were the whole of the life of the univer- 
sity we love, it would be worth all it has cost. The 
money and the effort, the faith and devotion these halls 
have seen would not be wasted. The university will 

119 



THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN 

live in you. You are her children — first-born, and it 
may be best-beloved — and in the ever-widening circle 
of your work she shall rejoice. For your influence will 
be positive, and therefore effective. It stands for the 
love of man and the love of truth. No one can love 
man aright who does not love truth better. And in the 
end these loves are alike in essence. 

The foundation of a university, as Professor Howard 
has told us, may be an event greater in the history of 
the world than the foundation of a state. By its life is 
it justified. The state at the best exists for the men 
and women that compose it. Its needs can never be 
the noblest, its aims never the highest, because it can 
never rise above the present. Its limit of action is that 
which now is. The university stands for the future. 
It deals with the possibilities of men, with the strength 
and virtue of men which is not yet realized. Its found- 
ation is the co-operation of the strong, its function to 
convert weakness into strength. The universities of 
Europe have shaped the civilization of the world. The 
universities of the world will shape the growth of man 
so long as civilization shall abide. 



120 



THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION. 

A PRACTICAL education is one which can be 
made effective in Hfe. We often abuse the 
word practical by ^making it synonymous 
with temporary or superficial. It should 
mean just the opposite. An education which takes but 
little time and less effort, and leads at once to a paying 
situation, is not practical. It is not good, because it 
will never lead to anything better. An education 
which does not disclose the secret of power is un- 
worthy the name. Nothing is really practical which 
does not provide for growth in effectiveness. There 
is nothing more practical than knowledge, nothing 
more unpractical than ignorance; nothing more prac- 
tical than sunshine, nothing less so than darkness. 
The chief essentials of education should be thorough- 
ness and fitness. The most thorough training is the 
most practical, provided only that it is fitted to the 
end in view. The essential fault of educational sys- 
tems of the past is that, in search for breadth and 
thoroughness, the element of fitness was forgotten. 
We have tried, as we used to say, to make well- 
rounded men, "men who stand four-square to every 
wind that blows." This is a training better fitted for 
hitching-posts or windmills than for men. This is the 
day of special knowledge. Only by doing some one 
thing better than any one else, can a man find a worthy 

121 



THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION 



place in our complex social fabric. The ability to do 
a hundred things in an inferior way will not help him. 
This is a fact our schools must recognize. No man is 
great by chance in these days. If one is to do any- 
thing of importance he must first understand what he 
is to do, and then set about it with all his might. 

Men of affairs often sneer at college men and col- 
lege methods. Some of their criticisms are justified, 
others not. Such justification as they may have had 
is found in the lack of fitness in college training. 
Among conditions of life infinitely varied the college 
has decreed that all boys should take the same studies, 
in the same way, and at the same time, and that these 
studies should be the routine of the English boy of a 
century ago. In thus repeating the thoughts and 
learning of nations half forgotten, the minds of some 
"Greek-minded" and "Roman-minded" men were 
stimulated to their highest activity, and for them such 
training was good and adequate. 

But there were some, "American-minded" perhaps, 
whose powers were not awakened by such influences, 
These came forth from the college walls into the life 
of the world, as Rip Van Winkle from the Catskills, 
dazed by the new experiences to which their studies 
had given no clue. 

I do not wish to depreciate the value of classical 
training. There is a higher point of view than that of 
mere utility, and the beautiful forms and noble thoughts 
of ancient literature have been a lifelong source of 
inspiration to thousands who have made no direct use 

122 



THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION 



of their college studies in the affairs of life. But there 
are other sources of inspiration which, in their way, 
may effect many to whom Latin or Greek would be a 
meaningless grind. For such as these a different train- 
ing is necessary, if our education is to be practical. 
The schools of the future will avoid not only bad train- 
ing, but also "misfit" training ; for the time of the stu- 
dent is so precious that no part of it should be wrongly 
used. 

The remedy for the evils of misfit training is not to 
discard the high standards or the thorough drill of the 
old college, but to apply it to a wider range of studies. 
No two students are ever quite alike, and no two will 
ever follow exactly the same career. If we work to the 
best advantage, no two will ever follow the same course 
of study. And thus recognizing in our efforts the 
infinite variations of human nature, the work of higher 
education acquires an effectiveness which it could never 
have under the cast-iron systems of the traditional col- 
lege. Misfit training is good only as compared with no 
training at all. Any sort of activity is better than 
stagnation. 

The purpose of right training is to prepare for work 
which is to last. There is enough already of poor and 
careless work. Whatever is done needs to be done 
well. Let it be done honestly — not as to-day's make- 
shift, but as done for all time. 

High under the roof of the Cathedral of Cologne 
there is many an image carved in stone and wrought 
with the most exquisite care, but which human eye has 

123 



THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION 



never seen since it was first placed in the niche in which 
it stands. This work of the Gothic sculptors was done 
for the sight of God, and not for the worship of man. 
The Cathedral of Cologne was almost a thousand years 
in building. I saw, the other day, a cathedral in one 
of our Eastern cities, built in barely as many weeks as 
the other in centuries. The marble sculptures on its 
lofty towers are made of sheet-iron, zinc-lined, and 
painted to represent stone. Such is the work of mod- 
ern cathedral builders. But the slow-moving centuries 
will show the difference. 

A Swiss watchmaker said the other day: "Your 
American manufacturers cannot establish themselves in 
Europe. The first sample you send is all right, the 
second lot begins to drop off, the third destroys your 
reputation, and the fourth puts an end to your trade. 
All you seem to care for is to make money. What you 
want is some pride in your work." If this has been 
true of American watchmakers, it should be true no 
longer. The work that lasts must be not the quickest, 
but the best. Let it be done, not to require each year 
a fresh coat of paint, but done as if to last forever, and 
some of it will endure. This world is crowded on its 
lower floor, but higher up for centuries to come there 
will still remain a niche for each piece of honest work. 

"Profligacy," says Emerson, "consists not in spend- 
ing, but in spending off the line of your career. The 
crime which bankrupts men and States is job work, 
declining from your main design to serve a turn here 
or there. Nothing is beneath you, if in the direction of 

124 



THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION 



your life ; nothing, to you, is great or desirable, if it be 
off from that." 

The test of civilization is the saving of labor. The 
great economic waste of the world is that involved in 
unskilled labor. The gain of the nineteenth century 
over the eighteenth is the gain of skill in workmanship. 
But with all our progress in labor-saving, we have yet 
far to go before our use of labor shall balance our 
waste of it. The work which goes to waste in Europe, 
even now, through lack of training and lack of proper 
tools, is greater than all the losses through wars and 
standing armies and the follies of hereditary caste. It 
is second only to the waste due to idleness itself. For 
idleness there is no remedy so effective as training. To 
know how to do is to have a pride and pleasure in 
doing. In the long run, there is no force making for 
virtue and sobriety so strong as the influence of skill. 

If a man knows how to do and how to act, he is 
assured against half the dangers which beset life. 
Training of the hand, training of the mind, training 
of any kind, which gives the man the power to do 
something which he knows to be genuine, gives him 
self-respect, makes a man of him, not a tool, or a force, 
or a thing. 

An unskilled laborer is a relic of past ages and con- 
ditions. He is a slave in a time when enforced slavery 
is past. The waste which comes from doing poor 
things in poor ways keeps half of humanity forever 
poor. What the unskilled man can do, a bucket of coal 
and a bucket of water, guided by "a thimbleful of 

125 



THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION 



brains," will do more effectively. It is the mission of 
industrial training to put an end to unskilled labor ; to 
make each workman a free man. When the time shall 
come when each workman can use his powers to the 
best advantage we shall have an end to the labor prob- 
lem. The final answer of the labor problem is that each 
should solve it for himself. 

I have spoken of the training of the hand; but all 
training belongs to the brain, and all kinds of training 
are of like nature. The hand is the servant of the brain, 
and can receive nothing of itself. There is no such 
thing as manual training as distinguished from train- 
ing of the intellect. There is brain behind every act of 
the hand. The muscles are the mind's only servants. 
Whether we speak of training an orator, a statesman, 
or a merchant, or a mechanic, the same language must 
be used. The essential is that the means should lead 
toward the end to be reached. 

An ignorant man is a man who has fallen behind our 
civilization and cannot avail himself of his light. He 
finds himself in darkness, in an unknown land. He 
stumbles over trifling obstacles because he does not 
understand them. He cannot direct his course. The 
real dangers are all hidden, while the most innocent 
rock or bush seems a menacing giant. He is not 
master of the situation. We have but one life to live ; 
let that be an effective one, not one that wastes at every 
turn through the loss of knowledge or lack of skill. 
What sunlight is to the eye education is to the intellect, 
and the most thorough education is always the most 

126 



THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION 



practical. No traveler is contented to go about with a 
lantern when he could as well have the sun. If he can 
have a compass and a map also, so much the better. 
But let his equipment be fitting. Let him not take an 
ax if there be no trees to chop, nor a boat unless he is 
to cross a river, nor a Latin grammar if he is to deal 
with bridge-building, unless the skill obtained by 
mastering the one gives him insight into the other. 

I often meet parents who wish to give their sons a 
practical education. They think of practical as some- 
thing cheap and easy. A little drawing, a little tinker- 
ing with machinery, a little bookkeeping of imaginary 
accounts, and their sons are "ready for business." 
''Ready for business," as though the complex problems 
of finance were to be solved by a knowledge of book- 
keeping by double-entry! Life is more serious than 
that. It takes a thorough education to make a suc- 
cessful business man. Not the education of the 
schools, we say,— and it may be so; but if so, it is 
the fault of the schools. They ought to make' good 
busmess men as well as to make good men in any other 
profession. They ought to fit men for life. Why do 
the great majority of merchants fail? Is it not be- 
cause they do not know how to succeed? Is it not 
because they have not the brains and the skill to com- 
pete with those who had both brains and training? Is 
it not because they do not realize that there are laws 
of finance and commerce as inexorable as the law of 
gravitation? A man will stand erect because he stands 
in accord with the law of gravitation. A man or a 

127 



THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION 



nation will grow rich by working in accord with the 
laws which govern the accumulation of health. If there 
are such laws, men should know them. What men 
must know the schools can teach. 

The schools will indeed do a great work if they teach 
the existence of law. Half the people of America be- 
lieve this is a world of chance. Half of them believe 
they are victims of bad luck when they receive the re- 
wards of their own stupidity. Half of them believe 
that they are favorites of fortune, and will be helped 
out somehow, regardless of what they may do. Now 
and then some man catches a falling apple, picks up a 
penny from the dust, or a nugget from the gulch. 
Then his neighbors set to looking into the sky for 
apples, or into the dust for pennies, as though pennies 
and apples come in that way. Waiting for chances 
never made anybody rich. The Golden Age of Cali- 
fornia began when gold no longer came by chance. 
There is more gold in the black adobe of the Santa 
Clara Valley than existed in the whole great range of 
the Sierras until men sought for it, not by luck or 
chance, but by system and science. Whatever is worth 
having comes because we have earned it. There is but 
one way to earn anything — that is to find out the laws 
which govern production, and to shape our actions in 
accordance with these laws. Good luck never comes to 
the capable man as a surprise. He is prepared for it, 
because it was the very thing he has a right to expect. 
Sooner or later, and after many hard raps, every man 
who lives long enough will find this out. When he 

128 



THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION 



does so, he has the key to success, though it may be too 
late to use it. 

It is the work of the school to give these laws 
reality in the mind of the student. The school can 
bring the student face to face with these laws, and 
even teach him to make them do his bidding. If we 
work with them, these laws are as tractable as the 
placid flow of a mighty river. If we struggle against 
them, they make the terrible havoc of an uncontrolled 
flood. To ignore them is to defy them. From our 
knowledge of the laws of nature arise the achieve- 
ments of civilization. These are our knowledge 
wrought into action. The thing we understand be- 
comes our servant. Whatever we know we can have. 
But whatever we conquer, our victory is a triumph 
of knowledge. 

We speak of this age as the age of inventions, the 
age of man's conquest of the forces of nature. But the 
man who invents or constructs machinery is not the 
conqueror. It is easy for one to harness the lightning 
when another has shown him the lightning's nature and 
ways. It is easier still to repeat what others have done. 
The applications of science are only an incident in the 
growth of science. The electric light and the locomo- 
tive follow sooner or later, as a matter of course, when 
we have found the laws which govern electric currents 
and the expansive power of steam. It is this knowl- 
edge which gives control over the forces of nature. 
It is by investigation, not through application or 
repetition, that man's power advances. It is the inves- 

129 



THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION 



tigator who comes in contact with the unveiled 
ways of God. The appHcations of electricity to com- 
mon purposes have been for the most part made in our 
day, but the knowledge on which they are based goes 
back to the earliest investigators of physical laws. 
These men forced their way into the infinite darkness, 
regardless of the multitude that would crowd into their 
path. An investigator is the cause of a thousand inven- 
tors. A Faraday or a Helmholtz is the parent of a 
thousand Edisons. Without the help of the university 
Edisons are possible. Only the highest training can 
make a Helmholtz ; for no man can reach the highest 
rank who has not entered into all the work of all his 
predecessors. 

And this brings me to say that the great work of a 
university is to be the center of investigation. It 
should be the source of new truths — of new conquests 
in every field. To it will come for the brief course of 
training and guidance many who, in the maturity of 
their lives, will accomplish much good for their fellow- 
men. In the ever-increasing circle of human knowl- 
edge new fields are being constantly opened. The 
whole knowledge of the last generation must be taken 
for granted as the basis of advancement for the next. 
Not till the circle of human knowledge has widened to 
infinity, shall we comprehend the infinite goodness 
of God. 



130 



THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. * 

I ONCE walked one Saturday afternoon out from 
the city of Canterbury across the fields of 
Kent. The hops were ripe on the chalk hills; 
for the growing of hops is the chief industry 
in that part of England. The hop pickers had finished 
their week's work and were returning to their homes 
in Canterbury for their Sunday rest. I walked out on 
the Gadshill road and met them on the way — a long, 
long procession of modern pilgrims. They came by 
hundreds and hundreds. There may have been five 
thousand of them in all. In the lead were the young 
and vigorous, the stalwart young man, the spirited 
young woman, those who thought nothing of a ten- 
mile walk when the day's work was over. Next came 
the older ones, equally strong, but more serious, who 
went on their way with an even step; while behind 
these, in the main body of the procession, were the 
old and the young, those whose strength was passing 
and those to whom strength had not yet come. 

Then, behind the middle, came those who had more 
than themselves to carry; men leading boys or girls, 
women with baskets, or with children who clung to 
their skirts. Still behind these were women carrying 
babies and men limping on crutches. And, last of all, 
were men who had taken the burden of a load of gin 

* Address to graduating class, University of Indiana, 1890. 

131 



THE PROCESSION OF LIFE 



from some wayside tavern; for the heaviest load a 
man can carry is the weight of a glass of liquor. 

And the thought came to me, as I watched them, 
that this modern procession of pilgrims to Canterbury 
was but a fragment of a greater procession which 
moves before our eyes all our lives — the endless pro- 
_ cession in which you who go from us today step 
forth to form a part. The thought of a Pilgrim's 
Progress, as it came to John Bunyan in the Bedford 
jail, is one which rises naturally as we look over the 
course of human life. What loads have we to carry, 
and how shall we come to our journey's end? We 
start with our burdens of hereditary weaknesses and 
hereditary sins, and to these we add many new ones 
which we take up along the road. What prospect 
have we of reaching Canterbury before the sun goes 
down ? And of what avail are our efforts on the road 
if we never reach Canterbury? 

Or, laying aside the metaphor, which may prove 
cumbersome, we meet the old question which comes 
afresh to every man, though countless generations 
have attempted its solution; what for us constitutes 
success in life? Certainly not the gaining of wealth, 
though many of our fellow-pilgrims seem to think so. 
If it were wealth alone, we have surely missed the way. 
You are not on the right road. There is a shorter 
way to wealth than the way you have taken, though 
the road may not lead to Canterbury. If you spend 
your day searching for gold, you will find it. A man 
finds whatever he goes forth to seek; but gold has no 

132 



THE PROCESSION OF LIFE 



value except the value your fellow-pilgrims agree to 
set upon it — the worth of the time, we may say, they 
waste when they stop to look for it. When a man is 
alone with gold, he is alone with — nothing. 

Not fame alone can constitute success. The gods 
care little for what men say of one another. Not the 
acquisition of power alone. The force of man can 
change nothing which is not already bound to change. 
A lever can move the world only when applied to a 
world which is moving. The force of man counts for 
nothing when placed in opposition to the laws of hu- 
man development. 

We are encompassed about by the forces that make 
for righteousness. All power we possess, or seem to 
possess, comes from our accord with these forces. 
There is no lasting force, except the power of God. All 
else in the world is speedily passing away. Is there 
no success for the individual? Are all lives alike in- 
effective? Not so. Measured by the standard of the 
Infinite, all life is short, and weak, and impotent; yet 
we know that, gauged by the measure of a man, there 
are many lives which are successful. We have all 
come in contact with such, and our own lives have 
been the richer for the contact. But we know, too, 
that there are broken lives. We pass them on the 
road. They stagger against us from the tavern steps. 
They are carried on for a time by the procession; 
but having no impulse of their own, they drop farther 
and farther behind — sometimes alone, sometimes 
dragging others with them. 

133 



THE PROCESSION OF LIFE 



These are not successful lives. What lessons do they 
teach? What have these broken lives in common? 
And what is this common element which we who hope 
for success can avoid ? Is it poverty ? Is life a failure 
if we gain not wealth, we who now live in the wealth- 
iest of all times, here among the richest of all peoples ? 

There are many who think this. Povetty is pictured 
as the yawning and relentless gulf beneath our whole 
civilization. If we avoid poverty, are we assured 
against all forms of spiritual failure? 

We know that this is not true. Broken lives are as 
common among the rich as among the poor. In the 
palace and the hovel we may look for them alike. 
Chronic poverty may be a sign of a withered spirit, 
but it is not the cause. The real disease lies far be- 
hind this, as those know well who have tried to heal 
the sores of poverty by filling them with gold. 

Poverty, in itself, is not even a cause for discourage- 
ment. Poverty has been through the ages the heritage 
of the student, and in the procession of life the 
student has never walked in the rear. You who stand 
before me, the flower of our student body, do not 
stand with well-filled purses. Your money and lands, 
to take the average, would not keep you for a single 
year. The inmates of many poorhouses could make a 
better actual showing than you could make today. 
Yet you are not paupers. No one dreams of thinking 
you such. You have something, not money, which 
helps you to face the future. And it is something 
real — something which has a quotable value. No ; the 

134 



THE PROCESSION OF LIFE 



element of likeness in broken lives is not their poverty. 

Is it sickness or weakness which makes failure of 
life ? We know that it is not. Stalwart frames stand 
all about us from which the spirit seems to have fled, 
while there are other souls whom no pain or disease 
can tame. The great name of the nineteenth century 
cannot be that of an unsuccessful man; yet for forty 
years of his earnest and beautiful life Darwin knew 
not a single day of health such as other men enjoy — 
not a single day such as comes unasked and unappre- 
ciated to you and to me. Health is much, but it is 
not everything. A withered arm does not mean a 
broken spirit. 

What then can we ask as our surety against failure ? 
That which we seek, does it not lie in the very heart of 
man, the presence of a reason for living? Is not this 
the one touchstone which through the ages has sepa- 
rated success from failure in life? If a man live for 
worthy ends, his life is made worthy. With a 
lifelong purpose, and a purpose worthy of a life, there 
can be no failure. How can there be ? Be a life long 
or short, its completeness depends on what it was 
lived for. 

Stand for something — something worthy to build a 
life around. As your aim, so your life is. Your pur- 
pose, like an amulet, will guard you from failure. 
While it remains intact, your life cannot be broken. 
Poverty cannot hold you down, disease cannot weaken, 
adversity cannot crush. Your life remains, and you 
alone can break it. It takes a strong impulse to live a 

135 



THE PROCESSION OF LIFE 



life out to the end. If you live to no true purpose, 
your life is a burden on the atmosphere, and death 
will come to you long before you even suspect it. All 
around you are those who have died already — perhaps 
never have lived at all. More terrible than ghosts or 
disembodied spirits is the spectacle we see every day 
of spiritless bodies — the forms of those who move and 
breathe when we know them to be dead. 

And so, when as year by year your paths diverge 
over the earth, let us hope and pray that you may 
live your lives out to the end ; that at every roll-call in 
this world, when you answer to your names, it will be 
in the full certainty that you are still alive. 



136 



THE GROWTH OF MAN* 

A WISE man once said, "The Bible was writ- 
ten by outdoor men; if we would under- 
stand it, we must read it out of doors." 
They were shepherds and fishermen who 
wrote the Bible; men who, night after night, lay 
under the stars, and to whom the grass on the Judaean 
hills had been the softest of pillows. Even kings and 
prophets were out-of-door men in the days of Samuel 
and David. Out-of-door men speak of out-of-door 
things, and each man who speaks with authority must 
speak of things which he knows. 

In this fact, if you will let me compare small things 
to great, you will find my apology for speaking my 
message today in my own way. I wish to draw 
certain lessons in morals from certain facts, or laws, 
in the sciences of which I know something. For we 
study what we call Nature, not for the objects them- 
selves, but because the study brings us nearer to the 
heart of things, nearer to the final answer to all the 
problems of death and of life. 

There is a stage in the development of the human 
embryo when it is not yet human, when it cannot be 
distinguished from the embryo of other mammals, as 
of a dog or a sheep. There may be, at the same time, 
two embryos apparently alike, the one destined to be 
a dog, because of its canine ancestry; the other, in 

* Commencement Address, University of Indiana, 1889. 

137 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



like manner, to become human. These two, we may 
assume, may be absolutely alike to all the tests we can 
offer. They differ neither in structure, nor in form, 
nor in chemical composition. The lines along which 
they develop seem parallel for a time, but at last di- 
vergence becomes evident, and their courses separate 
forever. The one seems to lose, little by little, its 
human possibilities, while the other goes too far in its 
way ever to turn aside to doghood. The one moves 
toward its end as man; the other toward its destiny 
as dog. 

But the difference must exist, even when the identity 
of the two seems most perfect — a difference intangi- 
ble, immaterial, but none the less potent in its cer- 
tainty to lead to results. The one embryo holds 
within it the possibiHty of humanity which the other 
has not. No conditions of which we can conceive will 
bring the dog embryo to manhood, because the possi- 
bility of manhood is not in it. There is something 
which transcends chemistry, which tends to bring each 
embryo through many changes to a predetermined 
end. 

This is essentially true if the development be com- 
plete and normal. If its growth goes on irl the wonted 
fashion, it becomes what it can become. Its enclosed 
potentiality, or hidden powers, give form to its life. 
But not all development is normal. Growth may cease 
prematurely, or it may be cut short by death, and that 
which might have been a man becomes as nothing; or 
arrested development may leave a state of perpetual 

138 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



immaturity. This happens among men sometimes. 
There are dwarfs in body and dwarfs in mind — those 
who reach the age of manhood while retaining the 
stature or the intellect of children. Again, decay and 
decline come sooner or later to all living things. If 
decline begins prematurely, we have degeneration in- 
stead of development. What is true of man in these 
regards is true of all life in its degree ; for there is no 
law of human development which does not, in corre- 
sponding measure, apply to animals and plants. 

On the other hand, progress begets progress. Nat- 
uralists tell us of cases of development beyond ances- 
tral lines, of perfection beyond previous completeness. 
In such growth, the conditions which mark full ma- 
turity in the ancestor become phases of youth in the 
ambitious progeny. The maturity of the latter in one 
or more ways overleaps ancestral lines. Such ad- 
vanced development here and there through the 
organic world is one of the causes of the progress of 
the mass. By the side of the philosopher the common 
man seems like a child. The development of great 
souls has gone on in accordance with a higher poten- 
tiaHty than ours. Or, rather, it may be in accordance 
with a potentiality which we possess, but which has 
lain dormant within us. For great men need great 
occasions. Circumstances affect all development. 
They may draw us out, or they may hem us in. They 
may raise us, as it were, above ourselves, or they may 
close around us, so that only in our dreams are we the 
man we ought to have been. And if the environ- 

139 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



ment be too exacting, even these dreams cease at last. 

The lower animals and plants offer analogies to 
this. Each individual develops along the line of the 
resultant between the force of its own potentiality and 
the resistance of its environment. Thus, all degrees of 
fitness are produced, and from these varying degrees 
comes our perception of the law of the survival of the 
fittest in the struggle for existence. One of the primal 
causes of difference in organic life lies in the condi- 
tions of advanced or retarded developrnent. A higher 
: — that is, a more definitely developed — organism is one 
that has taken a step in its growth beyond those taken 
by its ancestors. It has omitted non-essential phases 
and has leaped at once to a higher range of its possi- 
bilities. It has come so much nearer the fulfillment of 
the potentialities within it. Another organism may 
stop short of ancestral acquirements. It is degenerate ; 
for less of its potentiality has become actuality than in 
its ancestors. 

Florists save the seed of their fairest flowers, that 
from these the species may reach still higher perfec- 
tion. Stock-breeders recognize that individual gains 
are inherited, and they choose their stock accordingly. 
So we have, year by year, swifter race-horses, better 
milk cows, sheep with heavier fleece, more sagacious 
dogs, and pigeons of more fantastic forms. Along 
certain lines of development anything is possible with 
time and patience. Because this is so, with each gen- 
eration our domestic animals and plants become better 
and better adapted to satisfy man's needs or man's 

140 



i^^^S^S^a, 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



fancy. But the potentiality of the race-horse was in 
the old nag, its far-off ancestor, who may have trotted 
his leisurely mile in ten minutes. The potentiality of 
the trained dog, "who can do anything but talk," lay 
in the gaunt and cowardly wolf, from which the races 
of dogs are descended. 

More perfect development comes from within, and 
is assisted, not caused, by favorable surroundings. 
This is shown in the very terms we use. We educate — 
that is, we "lead out." We develop— thsit is, we "un- 
wrap what was hidden in the original package. We 
evolve— ihdX is, we "unroll," as the ball of the fern-bud 
unrolls into the great fern leaf. And so we xmroll, 
unwrap, lead out whatever is already within. We can 
help to actualize latent possibilities. But whatever is 
finally brought forth existed in potentiality in the 
embryo, no matter how inert and impotent this may 
have been. But not alone in the embryo; for what- 
ever is in the embryo must have been a possibility 
with the parent. 

No great thing comes from nothingness. There 
must have been strength behind it. There must have 
been a potential Lincoln in Lincoln's humble ancestry, 
else a Lincoln could not have been. We can trust 
that studies in genealogy will some time show this. 
In each life there must exist a potentiality of some- 
thing not yet attained. Were it not so, the bounds 
of progress would be already reached, and swifter 
horses, brighter flowers, sweeter songs, nobler 
thoughts, and purer lives than have already been 

141 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



there could never be. Potentiality may be conceived 
as a series of direct lines leading from the past into 
the future, outward into space. The highest poten- 
tiality is that one of these lines which most favors 
fullness of life. For any organism to grow along this 
highest line is for it to make the most of itself — and 
the most of its descendants, too ; for the will to do the 
best may fall into the grasp of heredity. The gain of 
the individual becomes the birthright of the race. The 
man of yesterday is a child beside the man of to- 
morrow. Our ancestors of centuries ago dwelt beside 
the Swiss lakes in children's playhouses. Whatever 
one generation has tried persistently to do, the next 
may accomplish easily. If by effort we have, as it 
were, excelled ourselves, our children may also without 
effort excel us in the same line. The man we dream 
of will be above the weaknesses of past humanity. 
The perfect man will be the master of the world, be- 
cause the perfect master of himself. 

As in the physical world there are many departures 
from the normal type, there may be partial, distorted, 
or degraded development. In the moral world the 
same conditions exist; and such departures from the 
ideal type we call sin. Sin is man's failure to realize 
his highest possibilities. Its measure is the discrep- 
ancy between the actual and the possible man. It is 
the spiritual analogue of retrograde or distorted de- 
velopment. Personal degeneration is sin. Misery, in 
general, is nature's protest against personal degenera- 
tion. 

142 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



Total depravity is not the state of nature. It is the 
good man who is natural; it is the weak and vicious 
who are least human. "Great men are the true men," 
says Amiel, "the men in whom nature has succeeded." 
They are not extraordinary. They are in the true 
order. It is the other kinds of men that are not what 
they ought to be. If we wish to respect men, we must 
forget what they are and think of the ideal they have 
hidden in them — of the just man and the noble, the 
man of intelligence and goodness, inspiration and 
creative force, who is loyal and true, — of higher man 
and that divine thing we call soul. The only men who 
deserve the name are the heroes, the geniuses, the 
saints, the harmonious, powerful, and perfect examples 
of the race." 

If, then, sin is retarded or distorted development, 
righteousness is further development along the line of 
our ethical possibilities. Righteousness is thus 
achieved only by constant effort in the direction of 
self-control and self-devotion. As Aristotle says, 
"Nature does not make us either good or bad; she 
only gives us the opportunity to become good or bad — 
that is, of shaping our own characters." "Emphasize 
as you will," says Dr. Schurmann, "the bulk of the 
inheritance I have received from my ancestors, it still 
remains that in moral character I am what I make 
myself." This is the higher heredity, the aggregate of 
all our own past actions or conditions ; our deeds in the 
"vanished yesterdays that rule us absolutely." "On 
stepping-stones of their dead selves do men rise to 

143 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



higher things." And in a similar way, on stepping- 
stones of their ancestry, do races of men rise to higher 
civilization. But without effort, conscious or uncon- 
scious, in the direction of a higher life, each succeed- 
ing generation will fail to rise above the level of those 
before it. Then, as nothing is stable in the world of 
life, where there is no advance there will be retrogres- 
sion. And thus have fallen all races, and nations, and 
communities whose guiding principle has not been the 
fulfillment of duty. 

If there be any truth at the basis of these analogies, 
they are susceptible of wide application to the affairs 
of human life. 

The central thought of modern biology is that all life 
Is bound together by heredity, the ancestry of all beings 
going back with gradual changes through countless 
ages to simpler and simpler forms. Connected with 
this is the fact that the various stages in the develop- 
ment of an embryo correspond essentially with the 
conditions of full development in the creatures which, 
one before another, have preceded its appearance in 
geological history. 

"The physical life of the Individual is an epitome of 
the history of the group to which It belongs." The 
embryonic life of the child corresponds in a general 
way to the history of the group which culminates in 
man. The stages In the mental development of the 
child of this century represent roughly the stages 
passed through in the infancy of our race. In this 
sense each life Is a condensation of the history of all 

144 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



life. "In every grave," says the German proverb, 
"lies a world's history." 

From our study of evolution arises the new science 
of ethics, which teaches what 'ought to be from the 
knowledge of what has been. "Time was, unlocks the 
riddle of Time is." The central question in this study 
cannot be, as some have said, "what in the past man 
has thought ought to be," but what in the past has 
justified itself by leading man on to higher things. We 
can discover traces of the path which humanity shall 
tread, by looking backward over the road humanity 
has trodden, not alone over the early history of man; 
for only the smaller portion of this is within our reach. 
Our history of man is only a history of civilization; 
for barbarism writes no history. We can look be- 
yond the clouded period of human barbarism to the 
still older history which we share with the brute. If 
we find the line of direction of past development from 
animalism to civilization, we may in a way project 
this line into the future as the direction of human 
progress. 

What is this line of direction ? How does man differ 
from the brute? 

The intellect of man "is certainly a distinctive posses- 
sion. It is not necessary, as has been said, "to deny 
intelligence to the lower animals when we assert that 
the human mind is the most colossal and revolutionarv 
of all the modifications any species has undergone." It 
is not necessary to deny the elements of conscience to 
a dog or a horse in recognizing the fact that con- 

145 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



science is one of the essential attributes of manhood. 
The feeling of individual responsibility, the knowl- 
edge of good and evil — this is man's burden and his 
glory. Intellect and conscience — these are the acqui- 
sitions won by humanity, and by virtue of which it is 
humanity. 

This thought need not prevent our recognition of 
the natural origin of these powers ; for all phenomena 
are alike natural. The simple automatic reflex action 
in which the psychic force of the lower animals ex- 
presses itself is unquestionably the prototype of all 
nervous processes. Sensations — thought — action : 
this is the only order in which these phenomena can 
arise. The senses are the only source of action. All 
thought tends to pass over into deeds, and no mental 
process is complete until it has wrought itself into 
action. The brain has no teacher save the sensory 
nerves, which bring it knowledge. Its only servant 
is the muscles, for by their agency alone can it reach 
the outside world. In its essence, the intellect is the 
ability to choose among many possible responses in 
action. Simple reflex action, or "instinct," has no 
choice. It acts automatically, and in its one unchang- 
ing way. To choose one act rather than another is an 
intellectual process. This power of choice brings its 
responsibilities. Whoever chooses must choose aright. 
Wrong choice carries its own destruction. The con- 
science is the recognition, more or less automatic, that 
some lines of choice are better than others, and must 
be followed. By "better," in this connection, we must 

146 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



mean favoring life. That is best that "brings Hfe 
more abundantly." That is best which brings self- 
realization to the individual and to his fellows. In 
social life, self-seeking is not "right," even for the in- 
dividual. For the welfare of the one is bound up in 
the welfare of all. Here arises the ever-present prob- 
lem of the conciliation of the claims of oneself and the 
claims of others. To solve this problem is part of the 
work of the rational Hfe. All right must be relative. 
It may be compared to a line of direction rather than 
a position in space. There can be no absolute right- 
eousness. If there were, it would mark the limit of 
spiritual growth. 

To show the origin of conscience by the natural 
processes of development and competition in life is 
not to deny its existence or to lower its importance. 
All things we know are natural alike — the creation of 
man, or the formation of a snow-bank. All are alike 
supernatural ; for the nature we know is not the whole 
of nature. Any fact or process becomes exalted when 
we see it in its true relation, as inherent in the nature 
of things. Right conduct, so Emerson tells us, is 
"conformity in action to the nature of things, and the 
nature of- things makes it prevalent." The automatic 
or rational recognition of the fact that one response is 
better than another is an attribute of man. The 
stronger the conscience of man or race, the higher its 
place in the scale of spiritual development. The con- 
science is the real essence of that "something not 
ourselves that makes for righteousness." For that 

147 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



"something," though "not ourselves," has its seat 
in the nature of man. The fulfillment of the noblest 
possibilities of the individual — that is right. What 
falls short of this is arrest of development, imperfec- 
tion, sin. 

The conscience no more than any other group of 
mental processes can claim infallibility. It may be 
distorted, dormant, ineffective. A "clear" conscience 
is of itself the result of normal development. Ar- 
rested development is none the less a fault that its 
subject is not aware of it. Nature absolves no sinner 
on the plea of ignorance of her laws. The bent twig 
is none the less bent that outside influences have done 
the bending. The tree should have grown upright, 
and in this it has failed. 

It is often said that conscience is only relative ; that 
what is right today will be wrong tomorrow, and 
there can be no absolute good but the pleasure or the 
utility of the individual. What is the truth of this? 
Let us take for illustration the customs and laws of 
marriage. The patriarchs of old did wrong, so the 
chronicles tell us ; but neither the patriarchs nor their 
prophets, scathing moralists though these were, 
counted the possession of many wives as even the least 
of their wrong-doings. The sin of David lay not in 
taking another wife, but in the murder which gave 
him possession of her. Our civilization now condemns 
polygamy, and our statutes and beliefs tend to exalt 
the sanctity and the unity of the home. Is marriage 
for life but a fashion of the time, to pass away as 

148 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



polygamy has done, when opposite tendencies have 
sway? Is the one really right, and the other really 
wrong? What tests can we apply to this question? 

It can be shown, I think, that the richest human 
life is dependent upon the development of the home. 
The elevation of woman has been the keystone in 
modern social development. The ennobling of the 
wife and mother means the elevation of the race. And 
the elevation of women is impossible in polygamy. If 
this be true, the highest potentiality of the race can be 
brought about only through the marriage of the equal 
man with the equal woman. It may be literally true 
that polygamy, wife-beating, wife-selling, and similar 
practices were right in the infancy of the race. They 
may be right among races still in their infancy. "It is 
their condemnation that light has come into the world." 
They may be part of a stage of growth through which 
humanity must pass before higher things are possible. 

In like manner, we have gone through a slow process 
of development in our regard for the rights of others. 
To the lower animals, each other animal is an alien 
and an enemy. A little higher in the scale we observe 
the rudiments of family, or social, life; yet, in a gen- 
eral way, to the brute all other brutes are objects of 
suspicion and hatred. The earlier tribes of men killed 
the stranger, and doubtless ate him, too, with perfect 
serenity of conscience. Even the most enlightened 
nation of ancient times murdered and robbed all alien 
to their race, as a high and sacred duty toward the 
Lord. Their God was a god of battles. 

149 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



Every foot of soil in Europe bears the stain of 
blood wantonly shed. There is not a moment in its 
history but has been marked by some cry of anguish. 
The history of the Old World has been one long story 
of needless suffering and needless waste. Yet the 
wave of brutality has been an ever-receding tide. 
With each century it rises never so high again. We 
have seen the last St. Bartholomew, the last Bloody 
Assizes, and perhaps the last Waterloo and the last 
Sedan. The old house "in Duizend Vreezen," the 
house of the "thousand terrors," on the market place 
of Rotterdam, stands as a memorial of what can never 
happen again. Human life is growing sacred. The 
history of civilization is a story of the growth of kind- 
ness and tolerance among men. 

The history of slavery teaches us the same lesson. 
Once to enslave a conquered enemy was to treat him 
with comparative kindness. Slavery is positive ad- 
vance from cannibalism, or from massacre. We find 
no condemnation of slavery in the early history of 
the Jews. We find none in the early history of Eu- 
rope. Slaves have been bought and sold in our coun- 
try by strong, pure men, who felt no rebuke of con- 
science. The heroes of the Revolutionary history were 
not abolitionists. 

Yet it is true, "for the Lord hath said it," * that the 
man of the future will not be a slave-holder. There 
can be no free men in a land where some are slaves, 
because whatever oppression comes to my neighbor in 
some sort comes to me. "He hath made of one blood 



150 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



all the nations of the earth," and "Whatsoever ye do 
to one of the least of these my brethren, ye do it 
unto me." 

We know that humanity is growing toward the 
recognition of the need of equal opportunity for all 
men and women. The cardinal doctrine of democ- 
racy is "Equal rights for all, exclusive privileges to 
none." This is the tendency of human institutions. 
"We hold these truths to be self-evident," said our 
fathers a century ago, "that all men are created free 
and equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, 
and that among these rights are life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness." And these rights cannot be 
denied, even though the image of God shine faintly 
through a dusky skin. 

The feeling of brotherhood is extending to the 
brute creation. A society for "the prevention of 
cruelty to animals" would have been inconceivable in 
the days of Front-de-Boeuf or of Coeur-de-Lion. It is 
inconceivable now in those countries which are a cen- 



* This metaphor may find its justification in the lines of Maurice 
Thompson : 

— "I am a Southerner. 
I love the South. I dared for her 
To fight from Lookout to the Sea 
With her proud banner over me. 
But from my lips thanksgiving broke 
When God in battle thunder spoke, 
And that black idol, breeding drouth 
And dearth of human sympathy. 
Throughout the sweet and sensuous South, 
Was, with its chains and human yoke 
Blown hellward from the cannon's mouth 
While Freedom cheered behind the smoke." 

151 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



tury or two behind our race in the march of civiHza- 
tion. In the city of Havana, in the early morning, 
long lines of mules laden with pigs and sheep come in 
from the country. These animals' legs are bound, 
and they are slung head downward, in pairs, saddle- 
wise, over the back of a mule. Thus they come down 
from the mountains in long processions, the pigs 
lustily squealing, the sheep helpless and dumb. No 
one notes their suffering ; for in Cuba no one seems to 
care for an animal's pain. On Sunday afternoons in 
the same city of Havana, fair ladies and gay cavaliers 
repair to the brightest of their festivals, the bull-fight. 
A bull-fight is not a fight; it is simply a butchery; a 
fair battle has some justification. The bull, maddened 
by pricks and stabs, is permitted to rip up and kill 
some two or three feeble or blind horses, to be after- 
ward stabbed to death himself by a skillful butcher. 
A civilization which delights in scenes like this is to us 
simply barbarism. The growth of the race is away 
from such things. Cruelty to animals may not have 
been wrong when the race was undeveloped, and no 
conscience enlightened enough to condemn it. Cruelty 
in all its forms is a badge of immaturity, and toward 
neither man nor beast will the ideal man of the future 
be cruel. With time the feeling of brotherhood will 
extend to all living things, so far as community of 
sensation makes them akin to us. 

We cannot tell how far this feeling of brotherhood 
must go. This is certain, that our present relation 
toward animals, right as they may be now, will some 

152 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



day be barbarous. It may be that the time will come 
when the civilized man will feel that the rights of 
every living creature on the earth are as sacred as his 
own. This end may be far away, too far for us 
even to dream of it ; but anything short of this cannot 
be perfect civilization. 

'If man were what he should be," says Amiel, "he 
would be adored by the lower animals, toward whom 
he is too often the capricious and sanguinary tyrant. 
A day will come when our standard will be higher, 
our humanity more exacting. 'Homo homini lupus' 
said Hobbes, 'man toward men is a wolf.' The time 
will come when man will be humane, even toward 
the wolf — 'homo lupo homo! " 

No fact in Jewish history stands out more clearly 
than that of the gradual growth of the law of love. 
"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" — even this 
marks a great advance over the ethics of the Ammon- 
ites and the children of Heth. Yet between this and 
the Sermon on the Mount lies the whole difference 
between barbarism and the highest civilization. 

"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor and hate thine enemy ; but I say unto you, Love your 
enemies ; bless them that curse you ; do good to them that 
hate you." 

"But dig down, the old unbury, thou shalt find on every stone 
That each age has carved the symbol of that God to them was 

known. 
Ugly shapes and brutish sometimes; but the fairest that they 

knew; 
If their sight were dim and earthward, yet their hope and aim 

were true. 153 



^c=^ 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



As the gods were, so their laws were, Thor the strong might 

rave and steal. 
So through many a peaceful inlet tore the Norseman's eager 

keel. 
But a new law came when Christ came, and not blameless as 

before, 
Can we, paying Him our lip-tithes, give our lives and faiths 

to Thor." 

This question, then, is ours — Are we doing our part 
in the growth of the race? In the current of life are 
we moving forward? Do our years mark milestones 
in humanity's struggle toward perfection? Is the god 
within us so much the more unrolled, when our de- 
velopment- has reached its highest point? Can we 
transmit to our children a better heritage of brain 
and soul than our fathers left to us? Has the race 
through us gained some little in the direction of the 
law of love? If we have done our part in this strug- 
gle, our lives have not been in vain. If we have 
shirked and hung back, then ours is a line of retro- 
grade descent, and our lineage is a withered branch 
on the tree of humanity. 

To live aright is to guide our lives in the direction 
in which humanity is going — not all humanity, not 
average humanity, but that saving remnant from 
whose loins shall spring the better man of the future. 
The purpose of life is to be as near the man of the 
future as the man of the present can be. But we 
must be patient, with all our striving. The end of life 
is not yet. Humanity is still in its infancy, and this old 
world is old only in comparison with the years of 

154 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



human life. Only through centuries on centuries of 
struggle and aspiration can humanity approach divinity 
and the law of love be supreme. 

Books have been written on the seven or eight "de- 
cisive battles" in the history of civilization. Great 
battles there have been ; but the stake in any battle is 
less than it appears. There can have been no decisive 
battles. The growth in humanity goes on whether 
battles be lost or won. The leaven of Christianity 
would have wrought its work in Europe if Charles 
Martel had been overpowered by the Moors at 
Poitiers. A battle may decide the fate of a man or a 
nation, but not the fate of humanity. Kings cannot 
check its growth. Priests cannot smother it. It is 
never buried in the dust of defeat. 

Slavery died not because the battle of Gettysburg 
was lost. It was doomed from the beginning, and its 
death was only a question of time. Nothing could 
have saved it, and the success of its defenders on the 
field of battle would only have postponed the end. 
The forces of nature are fatal to it. Even the law of 
gravitation and the multiplication - table would have 
conquered it at last. That which endures is that which 
brings out the higher potentialities of manhood. All 
else must pass away. 

Not long ago, in a gallery in Brussels, I saw that 
striking painting of Wiertz, "The Man of the Future 
and the Things of the Past." The man of the future 
has in his open right hand a handful of marshals, 
guns, swords, and battle-flags, the paraphernalia of 

155 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



Napoleon's campaigns. These he is carefully exam- 
ining with a magnifying-glass which he holds above 
them in his left hand. At the same time a child be- 
side him looks on in open-eyed wonder that a man 
should care so much for such little things as these. 
For these banners and arms, so potent in their day, 
dwindle to the proportions of children's toys when 
seen in the long perspective of human development. 

The decline and fall of empires is not decline or 
decay. It is the breaking of the clods above the 
growing man. Kings and nations recede as man 
moves on. The love of country must merge into the 
higher patriotism, the love of man. Viewed as steps 
in the growth of ascending humanity, the changes in 
history have a deeper meaning to us. Our studies be- 
come ennobled. What have been the conditions of 
growth in the past? What conditions have led to de- 
cline and degradation? What tends to keep the in- 
dividual retarded and immature, and what tends to 
bring him farther toward the ultimate humanity? 

Now, as we look back over the annals of slowly 
advancing humanity, and behold the gradual develop- 
ment in wisdom, skill, self-control, and kindness, can 
we not also look forward along the same line to a 
future of ideal manhood? If Christ be the perfect 
man. He is perfect in this, that the potentiality of the 
race finds its fulfillment in Him. Seen in contrast 
with the perfect humanity, all else that we know is but 
infantile. Decay and death overtake us long before 

156 



THE GROWTH OF MAN 



we begin to realize any appreciable nearness to the 
sublime ideal of the Christian faith. 

"De Imitatione Christi" is one of the grand books 
of the middle ages. "Imitation of Christ," so far as 
the imitation is real — not in speech, not in dress, not in 
ceremonies, but in the inner life, — this alone can place 
us in close harmony with nature, and closer with our 
fellow-men. The expression, "love of God," is the 
love of good, the love of that which is abiding, in 
distinction from that which is merely temporal. It 
may reduce itself into love of the higher life, in 
which the progress of the race consists. For, in the 
words of the good Thomas a Kempis, "It is vanity to 
love that which is speedily passing away." In the 
despairing words of Guinevere may be heard the 
keynote of the conditions of growth: 

*Tt was my duty to have loved the highest 1 " 
"This is the first and great commandment. And the 
second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy- 
self. On these two commandments hang all the law and the 
prophets." 

What I have tried to say, T may sum up in a few 
words. There is an ideal manhood to which our 
human race must come. Every step toward this end 
which the individual man may take is a step won for 
humanity. The end rests with us. It is our part in 
life to work with all our strength toward the realiza- 
tion of ideal humanity, to add one more link to the 
chain which joins the man-brute of the pa.st through 
the man of the present to the man of the future — the 
man who is likest liim we have chosen for our ideal. 

157 



THE SAVING OF TIME * 

THE gods for labor give us all good things." 
This was part of the philosophy of the an- 
cient Greeks. They learned it as a fact of 
experience long before Epicharnus first 
put it into words. Over and over again each genera- 
tion of men tries its own experiments, and comes 
back to the same unvarying conclusion. In a thousand 
forms, in all languages, this idea has found its way 
into the wisdom of men. And it is a part of the same 
experience that the gods never give anything worth 
having for any other price. In their dealings with 
men they receive no other coinage. They know no 
other measure of value. Temporary loans they some- 
times grant, but when the day of payment comes, 
they do not fail to charge their due rate of interest. 
They never change their valuations, and they never 
forget. 

"By their long memories the gods are know." This 
proverb, like the other, has its source in a universal 
experience. Taken from the forms of classic poetry 
and cast into the language of today, it indicates simply 
the universality of law. When they spoke of the gods 
in phrases like these, the Greeks meant what we, in a 
different way, personify as the "Forces of Nature." 
These are the powers about us which act unceasingly, 

* Commencement Address, University of Indiana, 1891. 

159 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



and in ways which never change. These are the 
reaHties of the universe. All else is inert matter. 
Human knowledge consists in the recognition of these 
ways and forces. We learn to know them from our 
contact with them. Human power depends on acting 
in accord with such knowledge. In this lie the possi- 
bilities of man. He who knows the truth can trust 
all and fear nothing. There is no treachery in Na- 
ture's laws. He who strikes as the gods strike has 
the force of infinity in his blows. He who defies them 
wields a club of air. 

These laws are real and universal, and no man nor 
nation has ever accomplished anything in opposition to 
them. The existence of the simplest of these laws, 
those which, like the law of gravitation, can be ex- 
actly determined, men now readily admit. The man 
who leaps from a precipice expects to be hurt when 
he reaches the earth. The law of falling bodies is too 
obvious to leave room for doubt as to its results. 
But the laws of organic life are less simple than these. 
The laws we but half understand we hope in some 
way to defeat. Most complex of all laws are those of 
ethics and economics. Because these are not well un- 
derstood, and the relations of cause and effect are not 
easily traced, the average man believes that he is 
shrewd enough to break them and to escape the 
penalty. 

One of these laws of life which men are prone to 
disregard is that which decrees failure to him who 

160 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



seeks something for nothing, and well-being to him 
who pays as he goes. 

It is one of the truths of modern biology that 
progress in organic life comes through self-activity. 
In the last analysis most forms of advance in power or 
in specialization of structure among organisms re- 
duces itself to the saving of time. Time must be 
measured in terms of effort, and the essence df 
progress is that none should slip by without effort or 
change. 

In the embryonic stages of the various animal forms 
there is a period when any two, higher or lower, are 
alike; in this, at least, that no tests we may apply can 
show a difference. One element of divergence comes 
through the varying rates of developments. Time is 
saved in the one organism ; it is lost in the other. As 
growth goes on, the forms we call lower pass slowly 
through the various stages of life; their growth is 
altogether finished before any high degree of special- 
ization is reached. The embryo of the higher form 
passes through the same course, but with a swiftness 
in some degree proportioned to its future possibility. 
Less time is spent on non-essentials, and we may say 
that, through the saving of time and force, it is en- 
abled to push on to higher development. 

The gill structuje of the fish, its apparatus for 
purifying the blood by contact with the air dissolved in 
water, lasts for its whole lifetime. In most fishes 
there is no hint that any other mode of respiration 
could exist, or could be effective. The frog, a higher 

161 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



animal than the fish, sustains for part of its life a 
similar apparatus, but a further development sets in, 
and at last the inherited structure of the gills gives 
place to organs which insure the contact of the blood 
with atmospheric air. Gill structures are likewise in- 
herited by the bird, and mammal, and man, as well as 
by the frog and fish; for by the law of heredity no 
creature can ever wholly let go of its past. The fact 
that its ancestors once breathed in water can never be 
entirely forgotten. The same stages of growth are 
passed through in birds or mammals as in frogs or 
fishes, but long before the bird is hatched or the 
mammal is born, the gill structures have disappeared, 
or have suffered total modification. The true life of 
the new animal is begun at a point far beyond the 
highest attainment of the frog or the fish. The law 
of acceleration hurries the embryo along through 
these temporary stages, and in this fact of acceleration 
comes the possibility of progress. 

On the other hand, with animal or plant, degenera- 
tion and degradation result from the loss of time. 
Retarded development is incomplete development. 
Whatever narrows the activity of the individual, 
whatever tends to make of life — be it of animal or 
man — simply a matter of eating and sleeping and a 
continuance of the species, leads to degradation and 
loss of effectiveness. The creatures which rule the 
world are the children of struggle and storm. The 
sheltered life leads to inability to live without shelter. 
The loss of self-activity makes parasites and paupers, 

162 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



whether among animals, or plants, or men. It is one 
of those universal laws which act through all ages and 
all organisms, through the long memories of all the 
gods, that the creature which does not translate time 
into growth shall drop out of existence. 

And now, leaving the lower orders of life aside, I 
wish to consider some relations of these laws of self- 
activity to our own lives and the lives of our neigh- 
bors. "A nation," it has been wisely said, "is an as- 
semblage of men and women who can take care of 
themselves." Whatever influence strengthens this 
power in the individual makes the nation strong; 
and, conversely, the presence of every man or woman 
who does not, or cannot, take care of himself, casts an 
additional burden on the rest. This power of self- 
support goes with the saving of the individual time. 
Franklin calculated that if every man and woman 
should spend three or four hours each day in useful 
occupation, poverty would disappear, and the after- 
noon of each day and the whole afternoon of our lives 
could be reserved for physical, mental, or spiritual im- 
provement. That we cannot thus have the afternoon 
to ourselves is due to the fact that we are paying our 
neighbor's debts. Our neighbor has taken our time. 
We are doing more than our share of the drudgery 
that hinders growth, and this because others in the 
same community are doing too little for their own 
development. 

The end of the social organism is fullness of life for 
the individual. The forms of society avail nothing if 

163 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



they do not bring larger life to the individual units. 
Whatever is not good for the individual man, cannot be 
good for humanity. 

We hear every day allusions to the wrongs of labor, 
to the justice which never comes to the poor man, and 
to the favor which always follows the rich. We hear 
of the industrial crimes by which the rich grow richer 
and the poor grow poorer. We see every day the ad- 
vertisements of the poor man's friend, paid for out of 
the poor man's money, and all of them seem to tell the 
same story. It is the desire of the poor man's friend 
to handle the poor man's money, and his chief quali- 
fication is the fact that he has never yet shown any 
skill in handling his own. 

We know very well that these wrongs of labor are 
not imaginary. It happens too often that those who 
are within may bar the doors against those who are 
without. We know, too, that under human laws it too 
often occurs that those the world calls fortunate have 
the luck of foxes and wolves, and can show no moral 
claim to the game they are devouring. 

Much that we call money-making is not the addition 
of wealth. It is money-transferring, not money-gain- 
ing. It is the process of making slaves of others, by 
turning into the pocket of the one that which is right- 
fully earned by the brains or the hands of others. 
Some day this manner of "making money," whether 
practiced by the "predatory rich," or the equally 
"predatory poor," will become impossible. It will pass 
under the ban as blackmail and highway robbery 

164 



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have passed. When it is condemned by public opinion 
the law will condemn it, too ; for our statutes are only- 
attempts at the formal expression of such opinion. 
Industrial warfare is not competition. It is the strug- 
gle of devices to stifle competition. Competition is 
rivalry, to be sure, but rivalry under conditions of fair 
play. Its function is to secure the best service — to 
put the right man in the right place. That one man 
should devour another is not competition. It is war. 
The abolition of private warfare within a nation has 
been one of the most important steps in human civili- 
zation. The abolition of private war in industrial 
relations will be another step scarcely lower in im- 
portance. But this must come with the growth of 
human wisdom, by which destructive and dishonest 
practices may be condemned. It cannot be brought 
about by the application of force. It cannot follow 
any form of arbitrary legislation. All statutes must 
be of equal application; for in taking away from the 
barons, of whatever kind — feudal or industrial, — the 
right of private war, the people are bound to guaran- 
tee that private war shall not be waged against them. 
With all that may be said of the injustice of our 
social order, there are not many whose place in it is 
not fixed by their own character and training. In 
America today most men find that the position 
awarded them is the only one possible. Accident and 
misfortune aside, not many are poor who could ever 
have been otherwise. To Robinson Crusoe alone on 
his desert island, as Dr. Warner has shown, most 

165 



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forms of misery we know could have come if he had 
developed their causes. Weakness and poverty are 
not wholly caused by social conditions. Even with no 
social system at all, folly, vice, or crime will always 
bring weakness, misery, poverty. Misery, in general, 
is nature's protest against personal degradation. No 
man needs the help of others in order to degrade 
himself. 

To be poor in worldly goods is not all of poverty. 
Such poverty may be in itself no evil. Wealth is a 
costly thing. Many a man is poor because he has 
intelligently refused to pay the price of wealth. He 
has turned his time and effort into channels which 
brought him spiritual or mental rather than economic 
gain. But such as these are satisfied with their bar- 
gain, and not one of them is aware that any wrong 
has been done to him. He has what he has paid for, 
and asks for nothing else; and we who know him as 
our neighbor never think of him as poor. He could 
only wish for wealth as a means of securing a more 
perfect poverty. 

"The gods for labor give us all good things," but 
not all to the same man. Each must choose for him- 
self, and it is a happy condition that each one who has 
earned the right to choose is satisfied with his choice. 
Those who have not earned this right must, from the 
nature of things, be discontented. The man who has 
wasted his time must take the last choice. He comes 
in for the little that is left. With the leisure of life all 

166 



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spent in advance, the interest on borrowed time must 
be paid under the hardest of creditors. 

A great problem of our day, which engages the best 
thoughts of the strongest minds, is this : How can the 
power of self-support be restored to those who have 
lost it? How are those who swim on the crest of the 
wave to lend a hand to the submerged tenth who 
struggle ineffectively in waters which only grow 
deeper as our civilization moves on? What can the 
strong do for the weak? 

"The rich man," it is often said, "must know how 
the poor man lives," for in keeping together is the 
safety of humanity. But even more pertinent than 
this is the other saying, that, in his turn, "the poor 
man must learn to know how the rich man works." 
It is true enough that there are among us some rich 
men who never work, some few supported splendidly 
in idleness, at public cost, the reward of the good for- 
tune, or the hard work, or the successful trickery of 
some ancestor. These gilded paupers are not many in 
America, after all, — some "four hundred," are there 
not, in each of our great cities? And the number is 
not increasing; for their hold on inherited power 
grows constantly weaker. They are but froth on the 
waves of humanity, and the burden of carrying them 
is not one of the heaviest the American citizen has to 
bear. Their life in our country is an anachronism, as 
they themselves are not slow to recognize. Their 
place, and their time, is in feudal Europe, and not in 
the America of to-day. 

167 



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In the old times the poor man worked, and the 
rich man was idle ; the poor man paid the taxes which 
supported the gentleman in pauperism. "The rich," 
indeed, "grew richer, and the poor poorer." The 
poor man worked on with an ever-decreasing vitality, 
because work absorbed his strength, and he could not 
direct his own forces. Work without self-consent is 
not growth, but slavery. In like manner, the rich 
man slipped into degeneracy, because his existence 
was purposeless, and he was conscious of no need of 
self-support. The man of leisure, whether rich or 
poor, is in the body politic like carbonic acid in the 
air — it supports neither combustion nor respiration. 
His presence is poisonous, though in himself he may 
be productive of neither harm nor good. 

There are some rich men, however, who have the 
right to be rich. They have paid the price, and they 
are entitled to enjoy their bargain. He who saves the 
toil of a thousand men has a right to some share of 
their earnings. Sooner or later, we may be sure, this 
share will be no more and no less than has been fairly 
earned. The forces of nature are hemmed in by no 
patent. No man can have a perpetual monopoly; 
and, sooner or later, the knowledge of the one becomes 
the property of all. 

The power of capital does not lie in its own force, 
but in the force of the brains which must, sooner or 
later, take possession of it, and to which labor un- 
directed by mind must ever stand in the relation of a 
slave. Money alone has no power. "The fool and his 

168 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



money are soon parted." Capital is only an instru- 
ment. It is effective only when it represents a single 
will in action. The decision of one man has greater 
force than the feeble or clashing desires of thousands. 

It is not true that wealth is the result of "labor 
applied to the forces of nature." The gaining of 
wealth is the result of wise direction or of skillful 
manipulation. In the long run, the majority of em- 
ployers of labor are eaten out of house and home by 
employees who have no stake in the result, and, there- 
fore, nothing to lose from failure. 

The little boy in the child's story* says : 

"My feet, they haul me round the house; 

They hoist me up the stairs; 
I only have to steer them, and 
They ride me everywheres." 

The average man's view of capital is of the same 
kind. He underestimates the importance of the steer- 
ing part of the work, without which no labor yields 
wealth, and without which capital is ineffective. If he 
understood the value of wise direction of effort he 
would cease to be an average man. 

The industrial dangers which threaten our country 
come not primarily from the power of the rich, but 
from the weakness of the poor. Too often the poor 
are taking to themselves a leisure which they have 
never earned. The price they have paid in life is the 
price of poverty. If part of it goes for whisky and 
tobacco, the rest must go for rags and dirt. Even 

♦From "The Lark," San Francisco. 

169 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



the lowest reward of labor well spent will buy a happy 
home. But, without frugality and temperance, no rate 
of wages and no division of profits can avail to save a 
man from poverty; and the waste of one man injures 
not only himself, but carries harm to all his neighbors, 
joined to him in disastrous industrial alliance. 

We are told that "poverty is the relentless hell" 
that yawns beneath civil society. So it is ; and a simi- 
lar comparison may be made in the case of the penalty 
which follows the violation of any other law of ethics 
and economics. "By their long memories the gods are 
known." Under their laws we live, and beneath us 
forever yawn their penalties. But we may change 
this metaphor a little. May it not be that this yawning, 
"relentless hell," is due in part to the presence among 
us of the yawning, relentless horde of men who would 
gain something for nothing? In whatever form of 
industry this influence is felt, it must come as indus- 
trial depression. 

The essential cause of poverty is the failure to adapt 
means to ends. A woman in the Tennessee mountains 
explained once the condition of the "poor whites" in 
these words: "Poor folks have poor ways." That 
their ways are poor is the cause of their economic 
weakness. And again it is written : "The destruction 
of the poor is their poverty." Without skill to bring 
about favorable results, the poor are constantly vic- 
tims of circumstances. These conditions of their lives 
lead to reduced vitality, lowered morality, and loss of 
self-respect. Effective life demands, as Huxley tells 

170 



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us, "absolute veracity of thought and action." Those 
who lack this will always be poor, whatever our social 
or industrial conditions, unless they become slaves to 
the will of others, or unless their weakness be placed 
as a burden on collective effort. It is certainly true 
that, even though each man in America were indus- 
trious to the full measure of his powers, the poor 
would still "be with us." There will always be im- 
practicable and incapable men, those who put forth 
effort enough, but who can do nothing for others that 
others are likely to value. There will still be the sick 
and the broken, the weak and the unfortunate. But 
if these were our only poor, all men would be their 
neighbors. Statistics have shown that, of ten persons 
in distress in our great cities, the condition of six is 
due to intemperance, idleness, or vice, three to old age 
and weakness following a thriftless or improvident 
youth, and one to sickness, accident, or loss of work. 
The unfortunate poor are but a small fraction of the 
great pauperism. Were there no pretenders, all who 
travel on the road to Jericho should be Good Samari- 
tans. Why not? The impulse to charity is the com- 
mon instinct of humanity ; but the priest and Levite of 
our day have been so many times imposed upon that all 
distress is viewed with suspicion. The semblance of 
misfortune is put on for the sake of the oil, and the 
wine, and the pieces of silver. We "pass by on the other 
side" because in our times we have learned that even 
common charity may become a crime. We have seen 
the man who has "fallen by the wayside" put vitriol 

171 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



in his children's eyes that their distress may appeal to 
us yet more strongly. We have learned that to give 
food to starving children thereby helps to condemn 
them to a life of misery and crime. To give some- 
thing for nothing is to help destroy the possibility of 
self-activity. And money gained without effort is 
ill-gotten gain. A blind man, to whom some one of- 
fered money, once said: "We should never give 
money to a blind man; for he needs all the strength 
he can have to help him compete with men who can 
see." Ill-timed help destroys the rationality of life. 
If the laws of life were changed so that the fool and 
his money were less easily parted, money would be 
wasted still more foolishly than now. 

Money given outright is as dangerous as a gift of 
opium, and its results are not altogether different. 
Only the very strong can receive it with safety. Only 
the very earnest can repay with interest the loans of 
the gods. Unearned rewards cut the nerve of future 
effort. The man who receives a windfall forever after 
watches the wind. There is but one good fortune to 
the earnest man. This is opportunity; and sooner or 
later opportunity will come to him who can make use 
of it. Undeserved help brings the germs of idleness. 
Even nature is too generous for perfect justice. She 
gives to vagabonds enough to perpetuate vagabondage. 

The strength of New England lay in this — that on 
her rocky hills only the industrious man could make a 
living, and with the years the habit of industry became 
ingrained in the New England character. This 

172 



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strength today is seen wherever New England influ- 
ences have gone. The great West was built with the 
savings of New England. Go to the prairies of Iowa, 
where the earth gives her choicest bounty for the least 
effort, over and over again you will find that these rich 
farms bear mortgages given to some farmer on the 
Massachusetts hills. The poor land of the mountains, 
worked by a man who gave his time and his work, 
yields enough to pay for the rich land, too. The 
Iowa farmer must work with equal diligence if he is to 
hold his own against the competition of Massachusetts. 

Not long ago, I crossed the State of Indiana on the 
railway train. It makes no difference where or in 
what direction. It was a bright day in April, when 
the sun shone on the damp earth, and when one could 
almost hear the growing of the grass. There are 
days and days like this, which every farm boy can 
remember — days which brought to him the delight of 
living; but to the thrifty farmer these days brought 
also their duties of plowing, and planting, and sowing. 
The hope of the spring was in all this work, and no 
one thought of it as drudgery. The days were all 
too short for the duties which crowded, and the right 
to rest could only come when the grain was in the 
ground, where the forces of nature might wake it 
into life. An hour in the growing spring is worth 
a week in the hot midsummer ; and he must be a poor 
farmer, indeed, who does not realize this. 

And I thought that day of the freedom of the 
farmer. He trades with nature through no middle- 

173 



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man. Nowhere is forethought and intelligence better 
paid than in dealing with Mother Nature. She is as 
honest as eternity, and she never fails to meet the just 
dues of all who have claims upon her. She returns 
some fifty-fold, some hundred-fold, for all that is 
intrusted to her ; never fifty- fold to him who deserves 
a hundred. 

Just then the train stopped for a moment at a flag- 
station — a village called Cloverdale, a name suggestive 
of sweet blossoms and agricultural prosperity. A 
commercial traveler, dealing in groceries and tobacco, 
got off; a crate of live chickens was put on, and the 
cars started again. The stopping of a train was no 
rare event in that village ; for it happens two or three 
times every day. The people had no welcome for the 
commercial traveler, no tears were shed over the de- 
parture of the chickens; yet on the station steps I 
counted forty men and boys who were there when 
the train came in. Farm boys, who ought to have 
been at work in the fields; village boys, who might 
have been doing something somewhere — every interest 
of economics and aesthetics alike calling them away 
from the station and off to the farms. 

Two men attended to the business of the station. 
The solitary traveler went his own way. The rest 
were there because they had not the moral strength to 
go anywhere else. They were there on the station 
steps, dead to all life and hope, with only force enough 
to stand around and "gape." 

At my destination I left the train, and going to the 

174 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



hotel, I passed on a street corner the noisy vender of a 
rheumatism cure. Sixty men and boys who had no 
need for cures of any kind — for they were already 
dead — were standing around with mouths open and 
brains shut, engaged in killing time. I was sorry to 
see that many of these were farmers. All this time 
their neglected farms lay bathed in the sunlight, the 
earth ready to rejoice at the touch of a hoe. 

Not long ago I had occasion to cross a village 
square. I saw many busy men upon it, men who had 
a right to be there, because they were there on their own 
business. Each one takes a part in the great task of 
caring for the world when he is able and willing to 
care for himself. On the corner of the square a wan- 
dering vagrant, with a cracked accordion, set forth 
strains of doleful music. The people stood around 
him, like flies around a drop of molasses. An hour 
later I returned. The accordion and its victims were 
still there, as if chained to the spot. The birdlime 
of habitual idleness was on their feet, and they could 
not get away. They will never get away. The mark 
of doom is on them. They will stay there forever. 

In these days, the farmer and the workingman have 
many grievances of which they did not know a gen- 
eration ago. The newspapers and the stump-speakers 
tell us of these wrongs, and, from time to time, huge 
unions and alliances are formed to set them right. I 
go back to the old farm in Western New York on 
which I was born — the farm my father won from the 
forest, and on which he lived in freedom and inde- 

175 



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f 



pendence, knowing no master, dreading no oppression. 
I find on that farm today tenants who barely make a 
living. I go over the farm ; I see unpruned fruit trees, 
wasted forest trees, farm implements rusting in the 
rain and sun, falling gates, broken wagons, evidences 
of wasted time and unthrifty labor. When one sees 
such things, he must ask how much of the oppression 
of the farmer is the fault of the times and how much 
is the fault of the man. 

It may be in part the poorness of his ways, rather 
than the aggression of his neighbors, which has 
plunged him into poverty. In very truth, it is both; 
but the one may be the cause of the other. It is only 
the born slave that can be kept in slavery. If a farmer 
spend a day in the harvest-time in efforts to send a 
fool to the Legislature, or a knave to Congress, should 
he complain if the laws the fools and knaves make add 
to his own taxes? If he stand all day in the public 
square spellbound by a tramp with an accordion; or, 
still worse, if he lounge about on the sawdust floor of 
a saloon, talking the stuff we agree to call politics, 
never reading a book, never thinking a thought above 
the level of the sawdust floor, need he be surprised if 
his opinions do not meet with respect? 

I can well remember the time when the farmer was 
a busy man. There is many a farm today on which 
he is still busy. It does not take a close observer to 
recognize these farms. You can tell them as far as you 
can see. Their owners are in alliance with the forces 
of nature. The gods are on their side, and they only 

176 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



ask from politicians that they keep out of their sun- 
Hght. Their butter sells for money; their oats are 
clean; their horses are in demand; whatever they 
touch is genuine and prosperous. The cattle call the 
farmer up at dawn ; the clover needs him in the morn- 
ing ; the apples and potatoes in the afternoon ; the corn 
must be husked at night. A busy man the successful 
farmer is. Being busy, he finds time for everything. 
He reads "bound books"; he enjoys the pleasures of 
travel; he educates his family; he keeps intelligent 
watch on the affairs of the day. He does not find 
time to stand on the station steps in the middle of the 
afternoon to watch a thousand trains go by on a 
thousand consecutive days. He carries no handicap 
load of tobacco and whisky. He goes to the county- 
seat when he has business there. He goes with clean 
clothes, and comes back with a clean conscience. He 
has not time to spend each seventh day on the court- 
house square talking the dregs of scandal and politics 
with men whose highest civic conception is balanced 
by a two-dollar bill ; nor has he time to waste om nos- 
trum-venders or vagrants with accordions. 

I hear the farmers complaining — and most justly 
complaining — of high taxes; but no duty on iron was 
ever so great as the tax he pays who leaves his mow- 
ing-machine unsheltered in the storm. The tax on 
land is high; but he pays a higher tax who leaves his 
meadows to grow up to whiteweed and thistles. The 
tax for good roads is high; but a higher toll is paid 
by the farmer who goes each week to town in mud 

177 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



knee-deep to his horses. There is a high tax on 
personal property; but it is not so high as the tax on 
time which is paid by the man who spends his Satur- 
days loitering about the village streets, or playing 
games of chance in some "dead-fall" saloon, j 

Mowing-machines, thrashers, harvesters, and all the 
array of labor-saving contrivances of an altruistic age 
serve nothing if they are not rightly used. They are 
burdens, not helps, if the time they save be not taken 
in further production. Labor-saving machinery be- 
comes the costliest of luxuries if the time it saves be 
turned into idleness or dissipation. 

I know a hundred farmers in Southern Indiana who 
lose regularly one-sixth of their time by needless visits 
to the county seat, and in making these visits need- 
lessly long. The farmer's time is his capital; its use 
is his income. One-sixth of his time means one-sixth 
of his income, or else his whole time is not worth 
saving. It is this sixth which represents the difference 
between poverty and prosperity. If this wasted sixth 
were saved by every farmer in Indiana, the State 
would be an industrial paradise. To have lived in 
Indiana would be an education in itself. People would 
come from the ends of the earth to see the land which 
has solved the labor question. 

But it may be that their own valuation is a just one. 
Perhaps there are some farmers whose time has no 
economic value. There are other such in every com- 
munity and in every line of life. The idiot, the in- 
sane, the broken, the dilettante, the criminal. For 

178 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



some of these great hospitals are maintained, because 
they can be more cheaply supported in public lodgings 
at the common cost. Shall we add the weary farmer 
to this list? Why not have a great State hospital for 
all men whose time is worthless — a great square court- 
yard, covered with sawdust, with comfortable dry- 
goods boxes, where they might sit for the whole day, 
and the whole year, talking politics or "playing pedro" 
to the music of the hand-organ, watching the trains go 
by? The rest of the world could then go on with 
the world's work, with some addition, no doubt, to the 
taxes, but with corresponding gain in having the 
streets open, the saloons closed, the demagogue 
silenced, and the pastures free from weeds and thistles. 
The frost is a great economic agent as a spur to 
human activity. There are lands where the frost 
never comes, and where not one-sixth, but six-sixths, 
of the time of almost every man is devoted to any pur- 
pose rather than that of attending to his own affairs. 
It is nature's great hospital for the incurably lazy. 
The motto of the tropics is summed up in one word, 
"Manana," "tomorrow." Tomorrow let us do it; we 
must eat and sleep today. "Mariana por la maiiana," 
one hears over and over again at every suggestion in- 
volving the slightest effort. It is too warm today; 
the sunshine is too bright; the shade too pleasant; — 
"Maiiana" let it be. This is the land where nothing is 
ever done. "Why should we do things when to rest 
and not to do is so much pleasanter? There is the 
endless succession of tomorrows. They have come on 

179 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



to us since eternity, and surely they will continue to 
come. Let us rest in the shade, and wait for the next 
tomorrow." 

I have not meant that one word of this should be a 
special criticism of the American farmer. It is still 
broadly true that the farmers as a class are the sanest 
of our people, the least infected by follies and with 
most faith in the natural relations of cause and effect. 
The farmers have not yet come to feel that their ad- 
vancement must be assured through the repression of 
others. They have not yet turned from nature to legis- 
lation in their search for wealth. The farmer deals 
with the earth directly. It is the earth, not society, 
that owes him a living. Of all callings, his is least 
related to the conventionalities of man. That he has 
scorned these conventionalities, that he has "hated the 
narrow town and all its fashions," has been the source 
of some of his misfortunes. For the town is nearer 
the center of legislation, and it has not been slow to 
cast burdens upon others for its own purposes. But 
if the farmer is the victim of unequal taxation or of 
unjust discriminations, as he certainly is, it is his duty 
and his privilege to make matters right. Even though 
sometimes he acts blindly — with the discrimination of 
the "bull in a china shop," — as when he votes for bad 
roads, cheap men, cheap money, and crippled public 
schools, it is not a source of discouragement. Men in 
cities do even worse than this. The farmer will know 
better when he has looked more deeply into the matter. 

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THE SAVING OF TIME 



But whatever the repeal of bad legislation may do, 
the primal necessity remains. 

"He who by the plow would thrive, 
Himself must either hold or drive." 

Whoever will prosper in any line of life must save his 
own time and do his own thinking. He must spend 
neither time nor money which he has not earned. He 
must not do in a poor way what others do in a better. 
The change of worse men for better is always painful 
— it is often cruel. But it must come. The remedy 
is to make men bettter, so that there need be no 
change. 

The rise of the common man which has been going 
on all these centuries demands that the common man 
must rise. This is the ^'change from status to con- 
tract," to use the words of Sir Henry Mayne, which 
is the essential fact in modern progress. But this rise 
has its sorrows as well as its joys. Man cannot use 
the powers and privileges of civiHzation without shar- 
ing its responsibilities. 

In the progress of civilization every form of labor 
must tend to become a profession. The brain must 
control the hand. The advance of civilization means 
the dominance of brain. It means the elimination of 
unskilled work. The man who does not know, nor 
care to know, how farming is carried on, cannot re- 
main a farmer. Whatever human laws may do, the 
laws of the gods will not leave him long in possession 
of the ground. If he does not know his business, he 
must let go of the earth, which will be taken by some 

181 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



one who does. In the words of a successful farmer 
whom I know, "Let other people's affairs alone, mind 
your own business, and you will have prosperity." If 
not in the fullest measure, it will still be all that you 
have paid for, and thus all that you deserve. 

I have wished to teach a single lesson, true alike to 
all men — ^the lesson of the saving of time. 

To you, as students, I may say: The pathway of 
your lives lies along the borders of the Land of 
Mariana. It is easy to turn into it and to lose your- 
selves among its palms and bananas. That thus far in 
your lives you are still on the right way is shown by 
your presence here today. Were it not so, you would 
be here tomorrow. You would wait for your educa- 
tion till the day that never comes. 

Different men have different powers. To come to 
the full measure of these powers, constitutes success 
in life. But power is only relative. It depends on the 
factor of time. With time enough, we could, any of 
us, do anything. With this great multiplier, it matters 
little what the other factor is. Any man would be all 
men, could he have time enough. With time enough, 
all things would be possible. With eternity, man be- 
comes as the gods. But our time on earth is not 
eternity. We can do but little at the most. And the 
grim humorist reminds us "we shall be a long time 
dead." So every hour we waste carries away its life, 
as the drop of falling water carries away the rock. 
Every lost day takes away its cubit from our stature. 
So let us work while yet it is day, and when the 

J82 



THE SAVING OF TIME 



evening falls we may rest under the shade of the palm- 
trees. He who has been active has earned the right 
to sleep; and when we have finished our appointed 
work, "the rest is silence." The toilsome, busy earth 
on which the strength of our lives has been spent shall 
be taken away from us. It shall be "rolled away like 
a scroll," giving place to that eternity which has no 
limit, nor environment, and whose glory is past all 
understanding. 



183 



KNOWING REAL MEN* 

IN a recent address, Professor William James 
has told us that the best result of a college edu- 
cation should be that you should "know a good 
man when you see him." In other words, it 
should teach something of the relative value of aims 
in life; to know good work from bad, and to ensure 
for ourselves, in some one direction at least, a grasp 
on a worthy ideal. 

Our next question is this: Has your college educa- 
tion given this power to you? A recent writer in the 
American Magazine maintains that his college course 
never gave it to him. He did not know good when he 
saw it. Many others would admit the same thing if 
the question ever occurred to them. The writer just 
mentioned claims that from his college course he 
gained no perspective. Near things bank larger than 
distant ones; accidents of the day outrank the great 
things of the past and the future. This he finds true 
from every point of view. For example, as a college 
graduate, Mark Hanna seemed to him a bigger man 
than Charlemagne. Later in life when the perspective 
became clearer he saw the difference and wished that 
he had made Charlemagne's acquaintance earlier. In 
his geography he says the map of Indiana and that of 
Montana covered each a page, and the one was as large 

*Graduating Address to the Class of 1908, Stanford University. 

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KNOWING REAL MEN 



as the other. New Jersey was as big as California and 
Maine as large as Australia. Later, when he crossed 
the Rocky Mountains, he found that the map did not 
do Montana justice. Its territory would make six 
states the size of Indiana. This didn't matter much in 
this particular case, but the same distortion of values 
appeared in everything he thought he knew. From 
this he concluded that his own college education was 
largely a failure. It did not meet Professor James' 
definition. He did not learn to know a good man 
when he saw him. He did not know things as they 
really are in their relations, one thing to another. 

When a wise man says a true thing, we can all say 
it after him. We wonder why we had not said it 
before ourselves. We see at once how hard it is to 
know a good man anyhow. If you as students take 
this matter to heart you will see the faults in your 
own education ; you cannot tell the best that lies about 
you. The graduates of other colleges have the same 
defect of vision, and our whole system of higher edu- 
cation is perverted in the same way. 

There was once a banker in the days of wildcat cur- 
rency who had a wonderful skill in detecting counter- 
feits. He acquired this skill not by studying counter- 
feits; he studied good money. Whatever was not 
good money to him was not money at all to him. It 
was mere waste paper, not worth even the name of 
counterfeit. So to detect error one must study truth ; 
the rest is waste and rubbish. To know a good man 
when you see him, you must study good men. All 

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KNOWING REAL MEN 



short of this is bad. To know good work you must 
study good work. The rest is frivoHty and common- 
place. 

This is a time to search our hearts, to size up 
our own promise of the future. Do you know a good 
man when you see him? Do you, after four years at 
Stanford, know what is really worth while? For ex- 
ample, some of you know, I presume, the best record 
for a quarter mile dash, for a race over hurdles, the 
record distance of a broad jump or a hammer throw. 
Some of you know a winning hand at poker, some 
how to tune up a rollicking song, some the manipula- 
tion of a skirt dance, some the framing of a sonnet, 
some the ideals of a Greek philosopher, some the art 
of inventing dynamos^ some the theory of ions and 
electrons, some the measurement of electric charges, 
some the secret of knowing equities, some the investi- 
gation of the energies of life. Some are prepared for 
the next ball, some for entrance into a profession; 
some to break into politics, some, perhaps, to adorn 
the front of a tobacco store. Can you tell which of 
these is worth while? 

There is an abundance of good work done at Stan- 
ford all the time. How many of us know the best 
thing, the best ten things, or any of the best ten things 
done by any Stanford man in the last ten years ? How 
many of you know the best things done here at Stan- 
ford in the year just past? Can you tell which of 
your number is best worth while; which one will be 
wise, sound, clean and efficient, after the struggles 

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KNOWING REAL MEN 



and roundups of twenty or thirty years? Which one 
will then be leader of your class, not by the ballot, 
which is an emotional test, when it is not a selfish one, 
but by virtue of his crystallized character, of his own 
innate strength, of his being through and through a 
good man and a man who makes good? Sooner or 
later you should know a good man when you see him, 
do you know this same man now? If you do, it is 
well and good ; this homily is wasted. If you do not, 
whose fault is it? Is it yours or ours? Or shall we 
modestly and justly divide the blame between our stu- 
dents and our teachers? Surely all share in the re- 
sponsibility, as we all suffer in the failure in result. 

There are many factors which tend to destroy the 
perspective in college life. These two bulk largest: 
The intrusion of the outside world — and the exaltation 
of side issues, the minor incidents, the byplay of boy- 
hood, to the injury of the real business of the college. 

The outside world intrudes through its vulgar stand- 
ards of morality, its eagerness for money getting, its 
instinct for sensationalism, its chase for vulgar pleas- 
ures and unearned and unreal joys. We cannot claim 
in fact that the standard of the average college man 
is continuously higher than that of other men ; that he 
bears a price so high that the politician and the bribe- 
giver cannot reach him. We cannot claim that the 
average college man bears a loftier standard of ideals 
than other men of equal native ability. Here and 
there is one in whom our best ambitions are made real. 
Such a one stands out above other college men and in 

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KNOWING REAL MEN 



him is our hope and our justification. But he must 
have been a rare man to begin with, and only the rare 
man can grow to be a better man after he leaves the 
college. A man can go through college and receive 
nothing of University ideals. There are many men 
who perform our college tasks, who meet our require- 
ments, who pass our examinations, who receive our 
degrees, and yet who never know at all what it is all 
about. The finest poetry, the noblest philosophy, the 
loftiest enthusiasm, finds them dumb and cold. Their 
heart is in the market place, or worse, in the vaudeville 
theatre, not in the Academe. The outside world, 
through its worst phase, the call for pleasure, holds 
them in its grasp. Perhaps we cannot help this. The 
very usefulness of the college, its popularity, its re- 
spectability, all growing by leaps and bounds, are 
sources of danger. They appeal to the unfit as well 
as to the fit ; they all extend invitations to the degener- 
ate as well as to the genius. And too often the college 
itself is deceived in this matter. It mistakes wealth 
and popularity and populousness for success. Why 
should we care for numbers, we University men? 
Why should we rejoice in popularity? Why should 
we welcome advertising? Surely none of these helps 
the college, none of them strengthens the hold of the 
college on the lives of men. 

In another way, less dangerous but still often disas- 
trous, the outside world infringes. This is through 
the spirit of money getting. What will the college do 
for me? It must raise my salary or I will have noth- 

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KNOWING REAL MEN 



ing of it. Trai-ning for live work does increase a 
man's salary. Thus it often becomes a means to this 
alone. Standing all alone, this is a petty end. To be 
sure, some source of income is the scholar's necessity. 
Every man worth while should earn his own living 
and enough more to pay his taxes and to do his part 
in the life of the community. The world owes no man 
a living so far as I know, and those who think it does 
and depend on collecting it, as a rule, have a deservedly 
hard time. But for the rest, money does not mean 
success. Stanford has stood from the first for prepara- 
tion for success in life, but of this success a financial 
surplus is only an incident — a minor factor^ — ^the small- 
est part of the whole. 

Again, the world, as we all see it, with its traditional 
associates, the flesh and the devil, makes its encroach- 
ments on the academic life in other guises, some more 
dangerous than the hope for financial gain. College 
spirit, like the mantle of charity, covers its multitude 
of sins. Much that passes as college spirit is the poor- 
est kind of vulgarity, the inspiration of the street, the 
bleachers, the saloon. Test your college spirit by this 
definition given by a Stanford alumnus, three years 
ago, and you may know whether it is genuine or not : 

"In loyalty to Stanford — to the whole university — 
by word and deed, always, by silence, even, when 
speech were disloyal; in honoring Stanford people to 
the measure of their loyalty and no more; in building 
with the builders through faith in the Stanford plan; 
in making every best effort spell Stanford before an- 

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KNOWING REAL MEN 



other name; in planting no seed in Stanford ground 
without hope of flower somewhere; and for the sake 
of these things reverencing the sentiment that gave 
the Stanford opportunity— therein Hes the beginning, 
but not the end, of the Stanford Spirit." 

If your college spirit is not the real thing, if it is 
counterfeit, it is no spirit at all. It is nothing at all 
but a bit of noisy shamming. There is no counterfeit 
money; what is not good money is not money at all. 
So with college spirit, what is not genuine is nothing. 
So with one's efforts in life ; what is not honest, what 
is not real, has no existence. 

The real Stanford— the Stanford you should know- 
is known by its ideals and its results. It is not the 
Stanford of the man on the street, of the bartender 
in a Cardinal saloon, nor even of the rooter on the 
bleachers at the great football game. The fate of 
Stanford depends on the moral victory of the clean 
mind and the stout heart. 

For part of your shortcomings, if you have any, 
the college teachers are to blame. We have been too 
worldly, too little serious. We have let in too much 
of the outside world and introduced you too often to 
its agents. We have let Mark Hanna displace Char- 
lemagne. We have made a science a railroad map 
in which our own line shows straight and large among 
feeble and meandering rivals. 

The other great source of loss of perspective is in 
the exaltation of what we call student activities. By 
this we mean not the activities of the student, nor even 

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KNOWING REAL MEN 



the student's natural and normal by-play, but profes- 
sionalism, with students as performers. Twenty years 
ago all of us welcomed football, track meets, and all 
other forms of intercollegiate athletics because it 
seemed to lay stress on physical betterments. We 
believe in sound minds and sound bodies, and the 
encouragement of all out-of-door sports seemed to 
tend in that direction. But the outcome has been very 
different from the anticipation. In each college two 
or three dozen of racers and gladiators trained out of 
all proportion, professionals in every sense, save that 
they are paid in gratitude and notoriety instead of 
money, practically monopolize our athletics. The rest 
of us as scrubs and weaklings worship from afar with 
noisy resonance. Our heroes of the day in the fierce 
light of publicity are exposed to praise or blame out 
of all proportion to their faults, their merits, or their 
achievements. Their duty is to win games, ours to 
show loyalty, and that by talk and yelling. And the 
tumult and the shouting has been organized into a 
concerted system as foolish as it is futile. I have never 
heard of a game ever won by the rooters, and it would 
not be honest sport if such were the case. 

I believe in athletics, in sturdy, virile athletics, even 
in intercollegiate athletics, as means to an end — the 
great end of making one's brain and body work in 
unison. There is no training much more essential 
than training in physical manliness, but no part of our 
present system contributes much to this end, while 
manifold evils appear on every hand, and most notably 

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KNOWING REAL MEN 



in the distortion of ideals in college life. As the red- 
coat bully in his boots kept Thackeray from seeing the 
Queen of England, so does the figure of the stalwart, 
athlete keep us from recognizing the real college men. 
We don't know a good man when we see him because 
we don't see him. Figures of exaggerated mediocrity 
fill the center of the stage. 

It is no answer to this to say that the same condi- 
tions exist in all our colleges, that your higher educa- 
tion is all in the same boat, and these evils are less in 
the California Universities than in any other of our 
great colleges. If this is true, but the more is the 
pity, the greater the need of a new revival of learning, 
a new revival of religion in the true meaning of the 
word, in the very heart of wisdom's chosen centers. 

The great Eastern colleges are feeling this. They 
are trying their best to exalt the real college men. 
They print names of honor students in larger and 
larger letters. It is the dig and the grind, after all, 
the man who does his work when the work is due, who 
stands for the college of the future. The athlete 
counts only as brains and courage are counted. For- 
tunately brains and courage often go with athletic 
skill and strength — but not always. The alumnus who 
does things worth while, who lives a gentle and a 
sturdy life, is the man who gives joy to his alma mater. 
Only the force of tradition, the inertia of institutions 
can excuse a college for granting its degrees to any 
inferior kind. A man is either a man or else he is 
not much of anything. There is nothing worth notice 

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KNOWING REAL MEN 



in a counterfeit. No institution can live, none deserves 
to live, unless from time to time it can be born again ; 
Stanford is ready today for a new birth and a new 
dedication. It is for you to help give it. It is for all 
of us to agonize toward it and when our young Uni- 
versity, already too old, is reborn, you will know and 
I shall know, and every true Stanford man and woman 
will know a good man when he sees him. 



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